Virus ravages nursing homes
There is an obvious need to do more for the facilities than just express outrage
The coronavirus has struck nursing homes in Virginia and elsewhere — those supported by public funding, primarily — with grievous, wretched effect. Too many people have died for lack of adequate staffing, lack of adequate equipment, lack of adequate understanding of what to do when confronted by a fast-spreading virus.
Nearly 10% of the nursing homes in America have reported cases of the coronavirus and there’s an obvious need to do more than express outrage, which comes easy in this country and on a vast array of topics.
The nursing home situation, with needless deaths occurring daily, requires considerably more than that. Now.
Start with just telling us what’s going on in these facilities. Somehow, some way “privacy” appears to have trumped other public imperatives — a right to know when lives are threatened — and that has to stop.
Privacy laws instituted through the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) are essential to patients in general but a hindrance at this moment. Public confidence is born of free-flowing, uninhibited public knowledge and there has been a clear tendency to throw up privacy regulations to mask gross negligence and incompetence.
Our commonwealth, and this country, should never again confront a viral epidemic in the dark. And in the dark — governor, take note; lawmakers, take note — is where we too often presently find ourselves in the crisis.
When the federal Hill-Burton Act — in the early 1950s — facilitated the construction of skilled nursing facilities, the core idea was all-too-obvious: Get the elderly out of the hospitals. Medicare and Medicaid programs in the mid-1960s put federal funding in the mix and, with funding, come standards, a regulatory structure and off we go.
Often the nursing home industry will point to the regulatory structure as more problem than remedy, that regulators simply do not understand what the industry — with the resources made available — is being asked to do.
Doubtless they have a point. There is a divergence of viewpoint on the role of government and public oversight.
But when a virus strikes and takes out dozens of nursing home residents at a time, then we need to do some serious and unflinching appraisal. There can be no divergence of opinion on the importance of protecting life, whether in a nursing home or anywhere else.
Last weekend, the Virginia Department of Health said that state long-term care facilities were especially hard-hit, with
733 cases and 41 deaths. Most believe the numbers to be greater.
The nursing home death count nationwide has climbed above 7,000 and will continue upwards, too.
And you wish — you just wish — that this situation was out of the ordinary. It is, but not enough.
Try this story, from the Associated Press:
“Despite a billion-dollar bonanza from the federal government, America’s nursing homes are a stark and lonely place to die. Abuses in money and medicine, an air of death and despair shadow the aged through the dusk of their days. Doctors rarely see their patients. Nurses use drugs freely to restrain the elderly. Mental patients are dumped into nursing homes by the thousands. And fraud feeds on the federal dollar.”
That was published in 1969. And something similar about every year since. We need an honest conversation.
Gov. Ralph Northam, whose health care background has been on display of late, needs to speak out on this subject immediately and draw industry leaders together.
By and large, investors do not get into the care of the aged to hurt people. By and large, nursing homes in Virginia are run with prudence and intelligence.
But not in all instances and that is abundantly obvious at the moment. Where there is chaos, there has to be sanctions; where there is chaos extending from a track record of inadequacy, there needs to be more than sanctions. There needs to be prosecution.
Ultimately, the situation demands not just more of the nursing home industry. It demands more of ourselves.