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This is not hyperbole. There are many elderly living alone, SScheck to SScheck with no one to lean on.
They’re a common admission when neighbors call in wellness checks and they’re found down or confused.
The other piece is the people who supply medical care and social services still get paid, one way or another and that payment comes from SS and Medicare. Every time someone doesn’t pay their bill, costs increase. That said, the purpose of a hospital care management team is to transition these elderly cases to a safe living situation. If that is now assisted living or a nursing home it happens by the grace of those institutions now essentially taking the monthly SS check to pay for the new room and board situation with caregivers on site.
These institutions would certainly miss the SS check. In fact, there’s a hard cap on the level of profit these institutions can make because they rely on the monthly senior benefits to pay their staff, supplies, and electricity. Those monthly benefits don’t really increase. And before you scream that there should be no profit, without profit, these institutions would not exist. People get paid, or doors close. We see this a lot on well meaning but short sighted (regarding money) mental health care institutions. But for elderly care, up until now, SS and Medicare paying costs has been reliable.
Which raises the question. If the nursing home doesn’t get paid and the dependent old person gets evicted? Where do they get evicted to? Bedbound, confused, where do they go?
I have an answer for that one. A medical reason will be found to drop them at a local ER, with no return (the needs of a patient can exceed the capability of an institution so this is legal and happens often enough). This makes the displaced SS recipient and senior citizen a not paying hospital customer. Moreover, they are a non-acute person taking up an acute care bed, leaving the ER even more clogged with even longer wait times as the flow out (in the form of discharges, freeing beds for ER admissions, which frees space in the ER for people in the waiting room) slows down even more.
I give the long explanation so you can follow yet another crack as it forms, leading to the eventual collapse of the already tenuous and strained healthcare system.
Your statement that they may just die is apt. Strangely, Heritage is serious about banning assisted suicide because it “lacks dignity”.
I refute your statement that "without profit these institutions would not exist".
Profit is what you get after every expense is paid. Caretakers, building maintenance, etc. Are expenses. People would still get paid.
Leeches on the other hand.... those "investors" who buy up assisted living places and force them to be "profitable".... they should not be allowed to gain off the increased suffering of people.
In a perfect world.
If what you say could come to pass then we’d never see another mental health institution close. But that is, sadly, not the world we live in.
Sadly, I have to agree with you.
The AARP has already started publicly lobbying against this move, and the for-profit institutions and their investors are probably doing so as well, but more privately because they don't want to rub their leechiness in everyone's face. So there is some small hope.