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Nursing homes across the country are kicking out old and disabled residents and sending them to homeless shelters and rundown motels.
The New York Times, June 21, 2020
On a chilly afternoon in April, Los Angeles police found an old, disoriented man crumpled on a Koreatown sidewalk.
Several days earlier, RC Kendrick, an 88-year-old with dementia, was living at Lakeview Terrace, a nursing home with a history of regulatory problems.
His family had placed him there to make sure he got round-the-clock care after his condition deteriorated and he began disappearing for days at a time.
But on April 6, the nursing home deposited Mr. Kendrick at an unregulated boardinghouse — without bothering to inform his family. Less than 24 hours later, Mr. Kendrick was wandering the city alone.
According to three Lakeview employees, Mr. Kendrick’s ouster came as the nursing home was telling staff members to try to clear out less-profitable residents to make room for a new class of customers who would generate more revenue: patients with Covid-19.
More than any other institution in America, nursing homes have come to symbolize the deadly destruction of the coronavirus crisis.
More than 51,000 residents and employees of nursing homes and long-term care facilities have died, representing more than 40 percent of the total death toll in the United States.
But even as they have been ravaged, nursing homes have also been enlisted in the response to the outbreak. They are taking on coronavirus-stricken patients to ease the burden on overwhelmed hospitals — and, at times, to bolster their bottom lines.
A Lakeview official said the company’s evictions were appropriate and weren’t an attempt to free space for Covid-19 patients.
But similar scenes are playing out at nursing homes nationwide.
They are kicking out old and disabled residents — among the people most susceptible to the coronavirus — and shunting them into homeless shelters, rundown motels and other unsafe facilities … Read more.
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