Man, did I ever have to take the scenic route to this post.
This morning as I scanned the news, I noticed a headline at The New Mexican‘s website:
“Delays, bankruptcy let nursing-home chain avoid paying settlements for injuries, deaths.”
This sort of revelation is always of interest to me, as I am of a certain age, Herself’s patience is not without limits, and I have seen my mother, her mother, and an old friend renting rooms in such places.
But I don’t subscribe to The New Mex, and didn’t bother trying to hurdle their paywall.
And then, in a sidebar beneath the main story, I saw the name of the nursing-home chain: Genesis.
Aha! As it happens we know someone who had a family member installed in one of their Duck! City facilities. This person failed to thrive, and the tales told did not recommend the joint as a comfy bench upon which to await the Greydog to the Hereafter, though it seemed a stint there might have made good training for a triathlon featuring Cormac McCarthy’s Road and Dante’s Sea of Excrement.
Our source called the outfit “Genocide.”
So I launched a quick search and hey presto: Turns out the piece by Jordan Rau was not by a New Mex scribe. It came from KFF Health News, the news arm of KFF, an endowed national nonprofit that calls itself “the leading health policy organization in the U.S.” (You may remember it as the Kaiser Family Foundation.) They have a very liberal reprint policy, but I’m just gonna give you the links and a free taste:
Once the nation’s largest nursing home chain, Genesis says it was spending $8 million a month defending and settling lawsuits over resident injuries and deaths in recent years. But the company is now poised to wipe the liability slate clean by seeking refuge in the most protective corner of the legal system for the nursing home industry: bankruptcy court. The Genesis case, one of 11 large senior care bankruptcies this year, illustrates how health care companies can dodge public and financial accountability for alleged negligence through delays, confidentiality clauses, and bankruptcy maneuvers, a KFF Health News investigation found.
It seems a bankruptcy judge has declined to sign off on one typical evasive maneuver (the sale of its nursing-home business, reportedly to an insider). Everything I was able to find on that was paywalled.
In other news, though the story mentioned three incidents in Duck!Burg facilities (Genesis has 10 of them here), and despite the ease of reprinting or citing KFF’s heavy lifting in this matter, I’ve seen nothing about this in the Albuquerque Journal, which has been otherwise occupied trying to make its grotesque website easier to look at and navigate.
A “Local” drop-down under “News” would be a plus. Recaps of gruesome murders in California and Australia I can get elsewhere.
And if I were a working editor instead of just another doddering old ink-stained wretch in queue for the Soylent Green treatment I might bookmark KFF Health News, too. The Genesis locations I visited today had full parking lots. Surely the visitors can’t all be personal-injury attorneys. Some might be subscribers visiting loved ones.
Mad Blog Media 
One thing I have noticed about the medical-industrial complex in the US is that you get what you (or somebody, anyway) pay for. Here in York Pee-Eh, we are in what I would consider a C market (A = high pay, medical pro’s want to work here, B = good pay, medical pro’s settle for here, C = meh pay, medical pro’s start here on their way to a B or A market). But there are exceptions. Cardiac emergency care here is A-level. Why? There’s money in it for the medical companies because of the high reimbursement rates for that. Primary care isn’t, as the biz types say, a revenue center. So in a C market for primary care you get the docs who couldn’t get into a specialty and are thralls of the insurance ghouls, who reimburse at such a shit rate that the managers dictate that no more than 15 minutes per patient is acceptable. And nursing homes? Hammered on both ends by insurance reimbursement rates and private equity. Since the pay is shit they can’t attract both enough and quality staff. And the immigrants who would take those jobs as their stepping stone are all getting ICE’d. Oy. Is it any wonder that my mother has told me she’d rather die that go to a nursing home.
For reals. Money talks, bullshit dies with its face turned to the wall, in a rusty wheelchair with no call button, and nobody to answer it.
Here we have the additional weight of what the medicos say is an outlandish “medical malpractice environment.” Thus good docs who can flee do so. You visit urgent care here and get diagnosed by a 14-year-old PA who scopes your ears to see what’s wrong with your nostrils. Etc.
When Herself the Elder was in assisted care here we heard a lot of Spanish spoken. Nothing wrong with that; it’s Albuquerque, you’ll hear a lot of Spanish spoken here. Still, one wondered who would be serving Jell-O and changing diapers if someone stuck his head in the door and shouted “¡La migra!” Would management pony up to hire U-nited States of America Americans? Doubtful.
I’m lucky, I guess. I never had the Marcus Welby experience so I’ve never expected much.