The growing use of sedatives to control elderly residents in understaffed nursing homes was highlighted in a June 12 report by the Pension Research Council at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business. Its description of the abusive way these facilities operate shows how the entire medical industry is organized under capitalism — to make the most profit for the wealthy owners, not to provide care for those who need it.
“Patients placed under chemical restraints require less work,” the report’s authors note. They reviewed staffing levels and sedative use across the 16,000 nursing homes in the U.S. between 2012 and 2021. “By reducing workloads rather than fulfilling them, nursing homes can hire fewer nurse staff while utilizing antipsychotic medications to still manage their patient load.”
The $200 billion nursing home industry, which encompasses some 1.2 million patients nationwide, is increasingly run by real estate investment trusts and other giant “health care-affiliated” corporations. Workers at these facilities face low pay, inadequate benefits and increasingly difficult working conditions.
To maximize profits, the bosses refuse to hire enough workers to provide residents at these facilities with basic care and timely attention to their needs. In fact, half of the workers in nursing homes quit each year, according to federal data.
The drugging of those cooped up in nursing homes has been going on for decades and is being stepped up as the capitalist crisis deepens.
“A U.S. Senate subcommittee reported as long ago as 1975 on the abuse of medications as a way to keep residents docile and easy to manage,” reports MarketWatch July 11. “A recent study suggested that nearly one resident in four is being medicated in this way.”
At many facilities residents with dementia are improperly diagnosed as schizophrenic so they can be administered antipsychotic drugs. In 2015 authorities revised reporting requirements for the government’s rating of nursing homes so bosses no longer had to report the use of antipsychotic drugs for residents who are diagnosed with schizophrenia.
Less than 1% of the population is schizophrenic, a disorder that is usually diagnosed in late adolescence or early adulthood, not in old age. But a 2022 government study of 99 nursing homes found that 20% of the residents were listed as “schizophrenic.” A nursing home in Ruleville, Mississippi, in 2023 had diagnosed 39% of its residents as “schizophrenic”!
No long-term care for workers under capitalism
Medicare does not cover long-term care that many working people will need as they age. In recent years millions of “baby boomers,” born after World War II and into the 1950s, are retiring and living longer. Their growing health care needs are more than most workers’ families can provide. But the capitalist rulers have done next to nothing to deal with this crisis, other than to claim that Medicare and Social Security will run out of money in less than a decade.
For Medicaid recipients to qualify for long-term care facilities, they have to turn over just about everything they possess to the corporate giants running these outfits, including their homes and all assets above $2,000.
Increasing numbers of older workers who think they can afford it turn to assisted-living facilities as an alternative to the wretched conditions in many nursing homes. But the higher cost for “rent” turns out to be escalated by daily “fees” — $12 for a blood pressure check, $50 for an injection, along with fees for help in shaving and even for a reminder that it’s time to take medication. And when you run out of money you’re out the door.
To end the profit-gouging capitalist “health care” system will take a social movement of working people in their millions to take political power into our own hands so that care for the elderly can become a right for all human beings.