Nursing Home Cause & Effect

Another post for the “we have forgotten how to be human” category. What do you do if your ailing grandfather is dying of loneliness in the nursing home? WRAP HIM IN DUCT TAPE! so you can safely give him a hug.

‘Hug tent’ provides safe embraces at Colorado assisted living center

h ttps://www.foxnews.com/lifestyle/hug-tent-colorado-elderly-home-safe-embraces

Lynda Hartman needed a hug.

It had been at least eight months since she touched her 77-year-old husband, Len, who has dementia and has been at an assisted living center in suburban Denver for the last year.

On Wednesday, she got a small taste of what life was like before the coronavirus pandemic.

Sort of.

Thanks to a “hug tent” set up outside Juniper Village, Hartman got to squeeze her husband of nearly 55 years . albeit while wearing plastic sleeves and separated by a 4-millimeter-thick clear plastic barrier.

“We’ve been trying to do it for a long time,” she said. “It felt good. I kept hitting his glasses when I hugged him, though. And he got cold.”

How… how did my people forget what a hug consists of? It consists of HUMAN CONTACT. Why is this hard? Of all the things that need to be hard, why is the concept of a hug one of them?

Although the setup wasn’t ideal, Hartman said, “At least you can do something, and it’s important.”

“Time is a precious commodity, so while we all wait to get back to more normality, in the meantime, everyone is doing what they can,” Gregg MacDonald said. “So I appreciate any efforts that they are making to allow us to have more contact with everybody.”

Except actually allowing contact with anybody.

For Gregg MacDonald, holding hands with his 84-year-old mother, Chloe MacDonald, was important because they hadn’t touched since April. She likes to get updates on her grandson and granddaughter.

Solitary confinement for ten months straight now? In the prison system, that would be illegal.

Amanda Meier, project coordinator for TRU Community Care, said she, her husband and some volunteers built the hug tent around a standard 8-by-8-foot popup frame and attached the plastic sheeting with glue and Velcro. Plastic arm sleeves built into the tent are attached with embroidery hoops.

Volunteers had to do this? Not the nursing home staff?

Since the beginning of November, she has helped set up four hug tents in Colorado and said the feedback has been positive.

“Lots of tears, but happy sort of tears, and a lot of shocked expressions of how in the world can we be doing something like this. It’s so weird,” Meier said.

Evil, not weird. I run low on adjectives to describe the cruelly faceless bureaucracy that has replaced God in the hearts of men.

This is elder abuse. They’d be better off dead than languishing like that. That’s not a personal statement, either; God made humans to need social and emotional contact with each other. Long-term deprivation of normal socializing is NOT ACCEPTABLE.

But after the initial weirdness, the benefits are clear, she said.

“You can see sort of relief in their bodies and their faces when they finally get to have that physical contact, which is really a basic human need. And in these facilities, a lot of times they’re missing it anyway because they’re just not with their families,” Meier said. “I don’t think it’s measurable, really. You just know it when you see it and feel it when you’re there.”

A gentle reminder that the death rate for Covid is 0.02% give or take a rounding error. If your pancreas is either diabetic or Stage 2 cancerous then it’ll go as high as five percent.

Therefore, we can proceed with a light heart to:

The Coming Wave of Nursing Home Closings

h ttps://www.nextavenue.org/the-coming-wave-of-nursing-home-closures/

By Sherri Snelling, 10 November 2020

And the worn-out muddy boots you walked in on, because you were scared the horse would give you Chinaballs.

More than 61,000 nursing home residents have died from the coronavirus since the pandemic began, 40% of all COVID-19 deaths. What’s likely to come next: a wave of nursing home closings.

It might be over 70k now that Mayor Cuomo had admitted to lowballing the death toll of his genocidal order to put confirmed-infectious COVID patients in those nursing homes.

In an August 2020 survey of nursing home operators by the American Health Care Association (AHCA) and the National Center for Assisted Living (NCAL), 72% of respondents reported an inability to maintain operations through 2021; 40% said they won’t last another six months.

“For many Medicaid patients, nursing homes are the only place they have to go.”

What happened to their families? Oh right, the Sexual Revolution. Women in the workplace.

Said Joe Steier, president/CEO of Signature HealthCARE, which operates 112 long-term care facilities in 10 Southern states: “The COVID pandemic was a black swan event no one was ready for that has resulted in the largest loss of beds in the country’s history.”

It was a rehearsed, planned, artificial Event 201. Fauci created COVID, Gates experimented with vaccines in Africa for a decade prior and who is surprised that another SARS came out of China? How are so many people this stupid? “How could we have known?” By recognizing the patterns and stretching your attention span beyond your next meal.

While older adults and nursing homes are at risk from the coronavirus pandemic, long-term care services and supports (LTSS) industry groups are signaling dire warnings about the continuum of care for the nation’s rising older population.

Again, how is this a surprise, that the Baby Boom generation reached old age? You were sure an asteroid impact would happen first?

Come to think of it, an influx of new customers should have made nursing homes extra-profitable. What’s going on?

“More than half of adults aged sixty-five plus require some form of LTSS as they continue to age. And the likelihood of need for care, and level of care needed, increases with age,” said Lisa Sanders, a spokesperson for Leading Age, a 5,000-member advocacy organization serving nonprofit long-term providers and affordable housing for low-income older adults, in an email interview.

Roughly 60% of nursing home-operator funding comes from Medicaid, which covers 70% to 80% of operating costs. The difference has been made up through Medicare or private-pay health insurance, but that funding has been declining, accelerated by COVID-19.

I see. The nursing homes are on a fixed income. How ironic.

The cause: nursing homes allowed themselves to become wholly owned subsidiaries of the State. The effect: elderly are treated worse than vermin.

It’s our government that sees the elderly as disposable. Not their families. Not God. When you see the elderly being neglected to the point where volunteers have to DIY some oxygen tents just to give a hug, that’s not a lack of government intervention. That’s a surplus of government intervention.

Since COVID-19, 97% of nursing homes have lost revenue due to increased costs for infectious disease equipment and testing, training and labor costs.

If you can’t afford to do it then don’t do it. Tell the gov’t to FOAD and if/when they pull their funding, do a photo-op of your closure. You chose to become a bureaucracy, now you have to act like it.

For most nursing home operators, the risks of sustaining their business fall into three categories:

1. Staffing
COVID-19 has required nursing homes to embrace infectious disease protocols and focus equally on minimizing patient risk of transmission and employee health, a structure Haynes believes many don’t have.

“The burden on our workforce is tremendous,” added Haynes. “We’re required to test staff twice a week, but many of our certified nurse assistants are having to drive thirty minutes to come to our offices for a fifteen-minute test and then drive back thirty minutes to get to their place of work.”

Nursing homes already had infectious disease protocols. What they didn’t have was PARANOIA over infectious diseases. Had there been an adult in the room, he would have said “we’ll do what we reasonably can but honestly, how did you reach age 70 without making peace with your mortality? You need a priest, not a contact tracer.”

I suppose that such a nursing home would have gone out of business. Unlike all the other nursing homes now going out of business. Seriously, the cost of doing right is at an all-time low. Take some bolt cutters to the local playground so children can start playing again, that’s the level we’re at right now.

“Nursing homes really took the brunt of negative coverage as COVID unfolded across the country,” said Steier. “Certified nursing assistants are the backbone of our workforce, but it’s challenging to recruit them when they can find less-demanding jobs in retail or other industries for comparable or better pay.”

Seriously? Your prospective employees would RATHER WORK IN RETAIL?!… for better pay?

2. Cost of COVID-19 Protective Equipment
In LeadingAge’s October “Situation Report,” some operators said they’re spending a year’s worth of their Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) budget on just one month of supplies.

While PPE and COVID-19 tests have been more available lately, they still represent a fragile supply chain. Large hospital systems are stockpiling supplies, especially N95 masks, leaving some smaller nursing home operators without necessary equipment.

More than 25% of nursing homes reported a shortage of things like N95 masks, gloves and gowns recently.

Since I mentioned pattern recognition, does this remind you of… restaurants? All that air-conditioned, padded indoor seating but they aren’t allowed to use it. They were told to convert their parking lots into indoor-tent accommodations with space heaters and even then, they aren’t allowed to use them half the time. “We’re going out of business!” gosh, really? What a surprise.

Similarly, all nursing homes already had equipment and procedures for handling the annual flu and related diseases. Then the State came along with these additional, insane requirements SPECIFICALLY TO PUT YOU OUT OF BUSINESS. They really do want to kill Grandma, and friends having meals together, and all of human civilization in general until the Great Reset.

3. Technology
“As we weather the second spike of the coronavirus this fall, technology is a key to surviving,” said Steier. “Regardless, it will take two years to get to where we were prior to the pandemic.”

Technology is killing you. New ways are not automatically better ways and the costs are not always worth it. Exhibit A: telehealth. Exhibit B: driverless cars. Exhibit C: hug tents.

It’s not enough that nursing homes are depriving the elderly of basic human socialization while making retail work look like the good life to their employees. No, nursing homes must also intentionally put themselves out of business because the alternative is telling a hatefully psychotic Federal government “No”.