Patients in thousands of nursing homes across the U.S. are denied essential medical care and assistance as the wealthy property owners prioritize maximizing their profits at the expense of the elderly and most vulnerable. Severe short staffing in these facilities, as well as in Veterans Administration medical centers nationwide, shines a spotlight on the deep social and moral crisis of capitalist rule.
The $200 billion nursing home industry — home to 1.3 million residents — is increasingly run by real estate trusts and other giant for-profit corporations. The refusal of these wealthy bosses to hire enough skilled nurses, or to offer high enough wages to attract workers, has been going on for a long time and is getting worse. Workers there also face increasingly difficult working conditions, with a high turnover rate each year.
A documentary titled, “No Country for Old People: A Nursing Home Exposé,” currently streaming on Amazon Prime, describes the plight that families with relatives living there confront in trying to deal with the abysmal conditions. Filmmaker Susie Singer Carter shows the “neglect and pain” suffered by her mother, who died at 89 after five years in a nursing facility in Los Angeles.
“They’re warehousing our most vulnerable people until they can’t bill anymore or they’re costing too much,” Carter says. “And that’s when different decisions are made — like putting someone into hospice who isn’t ready for hospice because hospice pays a lot, because Medicare takes over at that point, and they just have to keep a patient comfortable with morphine, and morphine is cheap.”
Placing relatives who need extra care in a nursing home is a huge expense. The national median monthly cost for a private room is over $10,600 — that’s more than $120,000 a year. Nearly two-thirds of nursing-home residents nationwide rely on Medicaid to pay these expenses, and cutbacks chipping away at this government program are increasing the pressure on working-class families trying to provide for aging relatives.
Sedatives and narcotics, like fentanyl, are increasingly being used to “control” elderly residents, the bosses’ solution for understaffed nursing homes.
At the same time, more nursing homes are being shut down or cut back, in response to declining profit margins. Nationally, there are some 15,000 nursing homes, and 774 of them shut down between February 2020 and July 2024. They were not making enough money to suit their owners.
Declining medical care for veterans
The federal Department of Veterans Affairs runs the largest medical network in the country, with 170 medical hospital complexes and 1,193 outpatient clinics to serve over 9.1 million former GIs. They also run nursing homes for veterans, euphemistically called “community living centers.”
All of the department’s medical centers report an insufficient number of workers. It increased 50% from the previous year, the inspector general’s office reported Aug. 12.
Last year “86% of campuses reported severe shortages of medical officers — which includes primary care doctors, psychiatrists and other positions — and 82% reported severe shortages of nurses,” the Washington Post reported.
And the department recently announced a budget-driven decision to cut nearly 30,000 workers by October. This will mean even longer waiting times for appointments, procedures and other treatment.
Meanwhile, one scheme becoming increasingly attractive to industry profiteers is to respond to depleted staff by deploying AI and robots.
Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology “have developed their first prototype of an eldercare robot,” reported MarketWatch July 30.
“‘EBAR,’ or Elderly Bodily Assistance Robot, can help elderly and infirm individuals walk. It can help them get up from a chair or step out of a bath. It can even catch them if they fall, deploying air bags where needed,” the article says.
What could go wrong?
And forget about human interaction and the dignity of patients trying to survive in this setup.