Where does the money go?

Lara Pettiss Harrill

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I was looking around to day for new nursing home stories, and I'm glad to say Jonathan Rosenfield at the Chicago Nursing Home Lawyer Blog had something i hadn't run across already - although I should have - I really think everyone should know about this story.

In Cincinnati, there is a facility that houses the Health Care Center at Westside and The Terrace, from what i gather, nursing home and assisted living - in March of this year, the police (that's right, the police) found terrible living conditions in these facilities - just after the facility had been inspected by the state in January and the city at the end of February. During those inspetions, the facilities were cited for only minor violations. So a police officer goes in looking for someone else and finds "deplorable living conditions" and returns two weeks later with more officers and both city and state health inspectors.

Now, we're talking about a really nasty place - vomit that has not been cleaned up, pipes tied together with shoe strings, roaches and flies, cigarette butts in the floor, residents smoking near oxygen containers, soiled mattresses, lack of toilet paper, lack of diapers for the residents - the list goes on and on.

So, as usual I got interested, and i found more articles, here here and here. The thing that makes me the angriest is that this facility is one of those facilities that typically houses the mentally ill (and by the way, the staff had no training to deal with the mentally ill) or the very poor, or those with no families - and what that says to me is 'no one to complain.' And then top that with the fact that apparently the state inspectors don't complain either, and these people get to suffer without anyone to speak up for them.

The facility operator Abe Fischer believes he's being somehow railroaded, see his picture here.

The facility has been receiving $3.2 million in payments, but the conditions are that terrible? Where the hell is the money going?

I do have to say, though I cannot explain it, that many of the residents don't want to move, and I can only guess that they just have no where else to go and after some period of time a place becomes your home, no matter how bad it is. I hope to never have that experience. I hope one day that this sort of experience no longer exists.