"The good news: Our region has the highest vaccination rates in the country, with Massachusetts second only to New Hampshire when it comes to people who have gotten at least one shot of the COVID vaccine. The bad news: We can’t secede. Not that we’d want to, right? Right? Sure, closing our borders has a certain appeal for those of us enamored of environmental regulations, sane gun safety measures, common decency, and herd immunity, but we all have loved ones out there in the world beyond, and, even now, the United States still seems like quite a good notion....."
She means nation, right?
"Support from police unions is no longer the political treasure it once was in Boston, but has the city reached a point where such backing would actually be disqualifying? Let’s hope so. Especially with this police union. Especially this year. The city has arrived at a long-overdue turning point. It had always been led by white men, but all six major candidates now vying to become the next mayor identify as people of color, and four of them are women, and Boston, like every city, has been forced to confront racism and police brutality in the wake of George Floyd’s murder last year and the protests for justice that followed....."
That's a quite a different tune from the decades-long Globe portrayal of Boston policing being the way to do race, and the truth is that stinking capital city is no different than any of the other dozen liberal hell holes that are America's major cities (all intentional to advance the Great Re$et goals, of course).
Now it is a blue wall of silence at the center of a crisis that could have been avoided with an abortion and where the BS flows he said what?
"House Speaker Ron Mariano did not cover himself in glory on Tuesday. First, at an endorsement event for Boston mayoral candidate Jon Santiago — held at the Villa Victoria housing complex in the South End, home to many Hispanic Americans — Mariano joked that he was “afraid my car’s gonna get stolen.” Yowza. Way to channel the bigoted grampy making a rare visit to the big bad city, Sir, and to perpetuate that racist caricature of urban centers as crime-ridden hellholes. The Quincy Democrat soon apologized for his comment, calling it “a poorly delivered attempt [at] humor,” based on having his car stolen when he was a student at nearby Northeastern in the 1960s. Santiago, whose big event was overshadowed by the comment, accepted his apology. Mariano’s other mystifying comments came in response to inquiries from my colleague Matt Stout about Sunday’s devastating Globe Spotlight investigation into the COVID-19 outbreak that killed 76 veterans at the Holyoke Soldiers’ Home last year, which raised questions about Governor Charlie Baker’s role in the crisis. The investigation found that Soldiers’ Home superintendent Bennett Walsh, woefully unqualified for his job, was a politically connected hire; that Baker and his Health and Human Services Secretary had been more involved in Walsh’s hiring and supervision than they’d let on; that Walsh was protected from the repercussions of his inept and volatile leadership until it was too late; and that an outside investigation commissioned by the administration contained errors and omissions that had the effect of insulating the governor’s office from scrutiny. Earlier this week, several lawmakers called on Baker to testify before the legislature about those revelations. That’s a great idea. If we’re going to make sure a tragedy like this never happens again...."
I'm just as concerned as a citizen as she is, but for different reasons because the remarks prompted chuckling from other lawmakers in the group and accountability in Ma$$achu$etts is really a joke. The Globe is of the opinion that Baker is personally responsible for the mass murder at the soldier's home, but I'm sure it will soon be forgotten.
You are encouraged if you wish to see more of the condensed versions of the columns I cited, and all links lead here for due credit, of course.
{@@##$$%%^^&&}
You can now take Mom out to lunch:
"CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK: Amid restaurant closures in Boston, there is an opportunity to reshape the city’s dining scene for years to come; The choices Boston makes now could affect the character of its dining scene for years to come" by Devra First Globe Staff, May 8, 2021
On a recent Saturday, sunshine streamed over the city, the temperature settled comfortably in the mid-60s, and Newbury Street was as busy as I can ever remember seeing it. Restaurant patios were full to bursting. The masses strolled, sipping iced coffee, an army of empty stomachs needing to be fed.
The diners are coming back, vaccinated and ready to hear about the specials of the day.
Some of the restaurants they would have visited pre-COVID have not come back with them. Statewide, 3,400 establishments — 23 percent of the total — closed permanently during the pandemic, according to the Massachusetts Restaurant Association. Although the MRA doesn’t break the numbers down by individual city, “what we do know,” says president Bob Luz, “is that Boston has been the hardest hit through all of this,” but alongside all of this loss, the vacancies now present an opportunity. These are high-profile spaces. Who will fill them and feed the city? The choices landlords, developers, and restaurateurs make in the coming months could shape the flavor of the restaurant scene for years to come.
When it comes to local character, Boston has so much to work with: famously excellent seafood, diverse cultures and communities, rich history, great live music, the arenas of academia, agriculture, medicine, technology, but even before COVID, it was a challenging place to run a restaurant.....
That was enough for me.
Yes, the demise of dining appears to have been greatly exaggerated -- even as the state government stiffs you!
{@@##$$%%^^&&}
These guys will be picked up the tab:
"At New England’s biggest companies, CEO paychecks surged in 2020 as revenues fell" by Shirley Leung Globe Columnist, May 8, 2021
Not even a pandemic could put a crimp in what has become an inglorious hallmark of American capitalism.
Consider this: In a year when millions of low-wage workers lost their jobs and the economy ground to a halt during the pandemic, the median CEO pay at the largest public companies in New England surged 21.4 percent, to $14.5 million.
So much for pay-for-performance.
Executive pay these days is inextricably linked to a company’s stock performance. So in a period where the overall market is booming, as it did after the initial plunge from the pandemic last year, these pay packages can swell to outsize proportions. Of course, while much of the stock awards CEOs receive are credited to their current compensation, many don’t receive that money unless the company and its stock hit performance targets over subsequent years.
That's where the turn-in came and she is already backtracking on the outrage, and I have been reading these kind of stories for years while the $tatus quo is further enriched at the expense of everyone else.
That's shell game they got going.
The enormity of these CEO paydays — against the backdrop of a pandemic that has exacerbated income inequality — is providing new ammunition to shareholders and policymakers to rein in the rich.
AFTER billionaires MADE $3.9 trillion during the pandemic while workers LOST $3.7 trillion, in a rever$e Robinhood sort of thing with a rigged game for you jocks as users to buy and sell “shares” of athletes in real time, based on how they are performing — much as investors would with shares of real public companies on a stock exchange..... like a Robinhood tied to a major passion for sports . . . and it’s a new market segment within daily fantasy sports, a huge opportunity [because] Boston is a massive sports town [and] . . . this plays into the DNA of Boston in a lot of ways,” says Isaiah Kacyvenski of the venture capital firm Will Ventures, who funded cofounders Dave Isman and Tyler Carlin, and who knows maybe they can even hook the kids on it all as they subtly shift us to a ca$hle$$ world that they control.
Perhaps the poster child of doing well in bad times is General Electric chief executive Larry Culp. GE’s board had reworked long-term stock awards that were previously pledged to him that made his total compensation worth as much as $73 million — contingent on Culp pulling off a turnaround of the troubled industrial giant. That made Culp one of the most highly-paid CEOs in the country, at a time when the pandemic crippled air traffic, resulting in GE revenues dropping 16 percent for the year and the laying off of thousands of workers at its aviation business.
First of all, no one pushed harder than her to bring that pig-in-a-poke as she jumps the $hark that could be worth $57 million based on stock performance.
“The acid test of any executive compensation arrangement,” said Bob Pozen, a senior lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management and former president of Fidelity Investments, is “when things aren’t going well, are [boards] able to dock CEO pay?”
Still, 2020 was such an unusual year it can be hard to draw broad conclusions. A number of New England companies had relatively modest declines in revenue given the massive, abrupt dislocation in the economy brought on by the pandemic. Some companies thrived during this period. Wayfair, the Boston home-furnishing online retailer, had a 55 percent increase in revenue, yet its CEO, Niraj Shah, continues to take a nominal salary.
The Globe never looks down that rabbit hole, raising further fears and suspicions regarding their motives given the ad service.
There were also outliers and unusual circumstances: DraftKings, the Boston online sports betting giant, went public last year, and the compensation package of Jason Robins, CEO and cofounder, was valued at $236.8 million, almost entirely tied to stock awards as part of a long-term incentive plan, and then there were those companies that had tremendous performances and their CEOs rewarded accordingly.
He is the latest newly minted billionaire.
Moderna is the most obvious of these; its revenues increased by more than 1,200 percent with government funding of its vaccine program, and CEO Stephane Bancel’s compensation rose 43.7 percent to $12.8 million as the Cambridge company completed the remarkable achievement of producing a coronavirus vaccine in less than a year.
He can pretty much $hrug off anything then, huh, as he greedily eyes the kids?
A few did not see their pay packages increase. The compensation for TJX chief executive Ernie Herrman was $14.5 million, a decrease of about 23 percent from the previous year — in lock step with how much company revenue dropped. Herrman and other senior managers took a pay cut in 2020 after the pandemic forced the parent of T.J. Maxx, Marshalls, and HomeGoods to temporarily shutter stores and furlough the majority of its 270,000 employees.
Outside the public realm, chief executives of the state’s two largest mutually-held companies both saw their compensation decline — close to 8 percent for Liberty Mutual CEO David Long, who earned $17.8 million, and about 11 percent for MassMutual CEO Roger Crandall, who made $16.1 million.
This year the fight against massive executive pay got a big boost with President Biden firing a shot during his recent address to Congress when he decried the yawning pay gap between CEOs and workers.
That was the second time I laughed out loud while reading, and ki$$ off!
Some investors are also losing patience with big CEO paydays. The season of annual meetings is just getting underway, yet already shareholders at six major companies voted to disapprove of the compensation packages of their CEOs, in so-called Say on Pay resolutions, including GE, AT&T, International Business Machines, and Starbucks, according to ISS Corporate Solutions, a consulting arm of the shareholder advisory firm.
These votes, mandated under the Dodd-Frank Act, are non-binding, but they send a strong message to boards that investors aren’t happy. Rosanna Landis Weaver, an analyst who specializes in CEO compensation for shareholder advocacy group As You Sow, expects a larger number of these pay packages to be rejected by shareholders this year than in 2020.
“The pandemic shone a huge spotlight on all kinds of different levels of inequality. It made us look at society differently,” said Landis Weaver. “It is not good for anybody. You don’t want to be a wealthy person living in a third world country.”
Really?
What would they care if the world is some sort of Ely$ium as it is and has been for a long time?
In any case, the WEF's Great Re$et isn't the answer (you will own nothing, they will own everything, and you will be happy).
The role of stock awards in CEO compensation, to some critics, not only skews the size of pay packages, but can also be an incentive for the boss to pursue short-term gains or cost-cutting that ultimately hurts workers, by suppressing wages or offshoring jobs.
COVID-19 also laid bare how much credit the corner office should get for a stock turnaround. After plunging in the early days of the pandemic in 2020, the stock market roared back; arguably some of that bull market can be attributed to the Federal Reserve cutting interest rates to near zero and Congress passing an unprecedented trio of relief packages totaling $5 trillion. The rapid development of vaccines also gave Wall Street some comfort that much of the economy could return to normal.
How can we when damage done with the money-printing, regardless of whether CVD magically disappeared overnight (we know it won't, but it's a nice thought).
“People are starting to question how much influence does the CEO have over stock price,” added Landis Weaver.
What, again?
Boards have long argued they need to pay their chief executives handsomely to recruit and retain top talent, or at the very least be in line with industry peers. Some say that has created a Lake Wobegon effect, where no company wants to be seen as below average, but compensation packages have ballooned to the point where all that money is creating a dynasty of profound wealth.
This is not normal. The grotesque compensation package has become a unique feature of American capitalism. According to a 2017 Bloomberg Global CEO Pay Index, CEOs of the biggest public US companies averaged $14.3 million in annual pay— in some cases nearly twice what their counterparts in the United Kingdom, Germany, and Hong Kong make.
Capitalism isn't the problem, for its roots are in the ri$k of entrepreneurship; however, Capitali$m is a problem!
Perhaps it would be OK if the average American worker shared in the largesse, but they have been left behind. An analysis done by the Economic Policy Institute found the ratio of compensation between CEOs and their workers was 21-to-1 in 1965; by 2019, the ratio was 320 to 1.
To rein this in, the Biden administration wants to increase the corporate income tax, nearly double the capital gains tax rate for incomes over $1 million, and end popular loopholes on inheritances and carried-interest that lower the tax bills of private equity managers.
While populist sentiment for an equitable economy is strong, advocates know change won’t happen overnight, and there are lessons to be learned from previous efforts that led to unintended consequences. In 1993, Congress prevented corporations from deducting the salary portion of executive pay above $1 million. That encouraged corporate boards to load up the stock awards side of the pay packages, over time resulting in lopsided compensation where salary is now only a fraction of the overall package. That's funny because Wall Street bailouts pass in a matter of days.
“We’re talking about turning around an ocean liner,” said Brandon Rees, deputy director of corporations and capital markets at the AFL-CIO. “We have a long road ahead to heal our economy. We’re optimistic that Biden’s economic plan will get that done.”
Yeah, one that's been hit by a ma$$ive iceberg and is going down, and yet the Globe plays on!
Regulatory fixes are top of mind for Pozen, the MIT Sloan lecturer who has been working with the Council of Institutional Investors and pushing for more transparency in executive pay. In 2019, the council petitioned the Securities and Exchange Commission to ensure that public companies explain how they use non-standard metrics to determine CEO pay.
Pozen also thinks Congress should put more teeth into “Say on Pay” votes: If shareholders reject the compensation packages in two consecutive votes, then the second one become binding.
“We have a lot of instances companies have not done really well, and CEO pay has been quite high,” said Pozen. There are always explanations. I’m not persuaded.”
Then there’s the Tax Excessive CEO Pay Act, first introduced in 2019 by Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, and again in March with a long list of cosponsors that include Massachusetts Senators Ed Markey and Elizabeth Warren, and US Representatives Stephen Lynch, Jim McGovern, and Ayanna Pressley.
Similar bills have been introduced in the Massachusetts Legislature — one by state Senator Jason Lewis and another by State Representative Erika Uyterhoeven
Sanders’s proposal would raise taxes on public and private companies that have at least $100 million in annual gross receipts, and whose CEOs make at least 50 times more than the median pay of their workers.
Had the bill been in effect in 2019, according to analysis from Sanders’s office, Walmart would have paid up to $855 million more in taxes. CEO Doug McMillon’s total pay was $22 million, 983 times the median pay of a Walmart worker of $22,484 that year, according to the AFL-CIO.
Sarah Anderson, global economy project director at the Institute for Policy Studies, likens the bill to levying hefty taxes on cigarettes; the strategy didn’t completely eliminate smoking but reduced the prevalence while raising money for public health. The same could happen by taxing excessive executive pay and using the proceeds to close the wealth gap.
“It would give a strong incentive for companies to change their behavior that would be good for everyone,” added Anderson.
It $ounds good, but carries with it the $tench of Communi$m.
On the list of largest New England companies analyzed by Equilar, only two — HubSpot and Wayfair — have low enough CEO-to-employee pay ratio to avoid additional taxes if Sanders’s bill were the law.
A ratio surtax is already in effect in Portland, Ore., and voters in San Francisco approved a similar tax in 2020. Proponents believe the policy encourages companies not only to reexamine executive compensation but also whether workers are being paid fairly.
Retailers often have the biggest pay gap because low-wage and part-time workers tend to make up much of the workforce. In 2020, TJX, the Framingham retailer, had a CEO-to-employee pay ratio of 1,108 to 1, with median worker pay of $13,135, according to its securities filing.
Uyterhoeven, the Somerville Democrat who wants Massachusetts to adopt an excessive CEO pay tax, said the ratio gets people to focus on how the status quo can’t endure.
“Inequality is hard to grasp,” she said. “Your CEO is making 1,000 times more than the median employee. That means you need to work a millennia to earn what a CEO made this year.”
Then I quit.
Once again, my criticism of her has nothing to do with her race or gender as I unmask her and what you need to know is this: “Today is a great day for America. If you are fully vaccinated, you no longer need to wear a mask. Get vaccinated — or wear a mask until you do,” but Dr. Nahid Bhadelia, an infectious disease physician and associate professor at the Boston University School of Medicine, is concerned that lifting government mask mandates may be premature in areas with lower vaccination rates and higher infection rates, and she questioned who, if anyone, would enforce a partial mask mandate. “The trouble . . . is, as a state or a locality, how do you enforce something like this? Because you’re not going to go around checking everybody’s vaccination cards, so then the question comes up, does it fall on businesses,” and the celebrity talking head who has never seen a patient questioned whether the nation has reached the threshold at which enough people are vaccinated to make the policy safe.
Again, no surprise there and closing racial wealth gap could grow the Massachusetts economy by $25b over five years, according to report building off a pair of national studies on the racial wealth gap by Citi Global Perspectives & Solutions and McKinsey & Co., but only if, if, if. The view never changes much and it turns out there are not their brother's keeper (I assume no relation?) -- unle$$ you are Bank of America, of cour$e!
{@@##$$%%^^&&}
Time to get Mom back to the nursing home:
"At nursing homes, fears of a viral rebound as workers decline COVID-19 vaccine and new residents struggle to get shots; Facilities are “a petri dish where we could have a resurgence”" by Kay Lazar Globe Staff, May 8, 2021
It was a battle many thought we had already won. Residents of nursing homes, the people most at risk of dying in the COVID-19 pandemic, were among the first to get vaccinated last winter, leading to a dramatic decline in new infections, but now, just two months after the ambitious nursing home vaccination program wrapped up, there are worrisome signs that the danger remains and may even be growing again. The percentage of nursing home residents who are vaccinated has declined since March, amid complaints from senior care leaders of difficulty getting shots for newly admitted residents.
Prepare for another massive culling of the elderly and beyond as the poisonous vaccines take effect and all deaths are called some new variant of CVD!
Perhaps more concerning, a sizable share of Massachusetts nursing home staff continue to go unvaccinated for COVID-19, despite aggressive initiatives to convince the hesitant. Just 59 percent of nursing home staff are fully vaccinated, according to state data. Now, nursing home leaders who witnessed the explosion of COVID infections and deaths a year ago are wary that their own nurses, aides, and other employees could risk the health of their residents.
Oh, that's the reason for the front-page fear, the vaccine that isn't a vaccine "hesitancy," and that is where came the turn-in.
“It’s a topic of conversation among every provider,” said Elissa Sherman, president of LeadingAge, a trade association that represents nonprofit nursing homes and assisted-living centers. “We have to do whatever we can to try to get as many vaccinated as possible.”
Why, for a "disease" that doesn't exist and if it odes, official numbers say 99.97% survive it?
This push to inoculate is becoming more criminal by the day given the tens of thousands dead and injured according to the VAERS reports (a likely undercount, too).
One of the largest senior care operators in the state, Hebrew SeniorLife, has already said its 1,125 nursing home staffers must get vaccinated, but has stopped short of enforcing the mandate. Others, fearing they’ll have difficulty filling positions, have so far relied on a softer approach.
Underscoring the anxiety is news of a recent deadly cluster in Kentucky. An unvaccinated employee ignited a COVID-19 outbreak at a nursing home where most residents — but only about half the staff — had been vaccinated. In all, 26 residents were infected, including 18 who had been vaccinated, and 20 workers were infected, including four who had been vaccinated, according to a review by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Three residents died, including two who were unvaccinated.
What happened there was the vaccinations were behind the spread, even if the agenda-pushing pre$$ turns it upside down.
That's the problem with the medical workers. They are on the inside off this and know it is BS, but are being held hostage with employment to stay silent and not say anything. It's evil and it's wrong.
The significant number of infections among vaccinated residents underscores the special risk of these homes, with their close quarters and largely indoor life and the often weakened immune systems of the residents. Nationally, less than 0.01 percent of people who have been vaccinated have been infected with the coronavirus, according to CDC data.
Wait a minute, the "vaccine" doesn't prevent you from getting sick?
They WHY TAKE IT AT ALL!?
In Massachusetts, state data show total nursing home COVID-19 cases have plummeted from several hundred a week in late January to roughly 30 a week recently, but senior leaders know that number can spike quickly if clusters of cases break out.
Or if the PCR tests are cycled past 35 or whatever the cutoff should be.
A much-heralded federal program sent pharmacy chains CVS and Walgreens into nursing homes and other long-term-care facilities nationwide from late December through early March to administer vaccines to staff and residents. When it concluded, 84 percent of Massachusetts nursing home residents at that time were fully vaccinated, state data show, but since then, as residents were discharged or died and others who are unvaccinated entered care, that figure has declined. Today, roughly 81 percent of nursing home residents in Massachusetts are fully vaccinated, the data show.
“It seems they are creating a new type of petri dish where we could have a resurgence if we don’t get a [vaccination] program consistently implemented,” said Daryl Cameron Every, a Milton elder law attorney who is encountering different COVID vaccination policies as she helps seniors transitioning between and among hospitals, geriatric psychiatric facilities, and nursing homes.
Vaccinations have dramatically tamped down infections, but unvaccinated nursing home staff remain a threat. On Monday, state health secretary Marylou Sudders said most of the infections were among nursing home workers.
Now, nursing homes are redoubling efforts to persuade reluctant workers to get their shots, offering staff paid time off, gift cards, raffle prizes, event tickets, giveaways, T-shirts, and more, said Tara Gregorio, president of the Massachusetts Senior Care Association, an industry trade group.
Mu$t one be coerced, and WHY?
They’ve also tapped nurses aides, housekeepers, and department heads to act as “vaccine ambassadors” to encourage their peers, she said, and they’ve provided educational videos and fliers in multiple languages, including Haitian Creole, Chinese, Spanish, and Portuguese, hosted by respected physicians.
Amid the high-stakes campaign, talk of mandating shots has percolated through the industry, but nursing home administrators worry that could drive out already-scarce staff.
“I do believe mandating is on the horizon and am strongly considering it down the road,” said Lou Woolf, president of Hebrew SeniorLife.
GET OUT OF THERE AS QUICK AS YOU CAN!
With deep resources and stable staffing, the Harvard-affiliated organization is unusual in the industry. At least 75 percent of Hebrew SeniorLife’s nursing home workers are fully vaccinated and another 6 percent are awaiting second shots, well above the state’s average.
A year before the pandemic, Hebrew SeniorLife required flu shots for the first time for staff. Administrators achieved 100 percent compliance by imposing what seemed at the time an onerous condition: Holdouts would be required to wear masks 24/7 during flu season.
“That was totally embarrassing then, but not now,” Woolf said. “We don’t have that hammer anymore.”
It still is, it's pathetic in fact, but how will they monitor the mask requirement?
The problem above is so many trained professionals will be lost if they mandate shots, and maybe that is exactly what the genocidal psychopaths in government and beyond want! More dead people!
In any event, DO NOT put MOM in a HOME!
"COVID forces families to rethink nursing home care" by Reed Abelson New York Times, May 9, 2021
At 86, Diane Nixon, living in an apartment at the back of a daughter’s house, no longer drives and has trouble getting around.
When her health worsened last year before the coronavirus pandemic, she and all four of her daughters talked about whether a nursing home would be the next step. She worried that she had become a burden to her children.
“She was very adamant about not wanting her daughters to be caregivers,” said Jill Cooper, one of her daughters, who lives nearby in the Pittsburgh area, but as infections began to tear through nursing homes across the country, killing tens of thousands of residents last year, Nixon and her family realized a group home was no longer a viable choice — especially after most of them barred visitors to help contain outbreaks.
“Not to be able to see her was not an option for us,” Cooper said, so the family contacted a local home health agency to hire someone to help her during the day.
“It made us look at an alternative that we might not have looked at as hard,” she said.
The pandemic’s toll on nursing homes drove occupancy down significantly — not just from the 132,000 deaths but also because of a decline in admissions. The 14,000 skilled nursing facilities in the United States now have on average a vacancy rate of slightly more than 25%, according to figures from the National Investment Center for Seniors Housing & Care, but as immunization campaigns inside them began taking priority in the winter this year, with nearly 3 million residents and staff members fully vaccinated, the outlook improved somewhat. Nursing homes point to the steep decrease in COVID-related deaths, saying they have dropped by 91% since December.
While the industry has received $21 billion in federal funding under the CARES Act as part of congressional efforts to help health care facilities during the pandemic, nursing homes are lobbying for more federal aid to cover the higher cost of personal protective equipment, testing and staffing at their facilities. They say that they are losing tens of billions of dollars in revenue because of the pandemic and that many homes are at risk of closing, but the deaths of so many elderly residents, captive in those homes, has deepened levels of anxiety and guilt among many families planning the next phase of care for an aging relative. Experts say rethinking the purpose of nursing homes is long overdue.
OMG, they want to kill us all!
Even before the pandemic began 14 months ago, nursing homes had become the source for rampant, antibiotic-resistant infections. The facilities also faced systemic problems like high turnover among nursing home staff and the gaming of the federal government’s rating system, which made it hard for families to judge the quality of homes.
For years, federal health officials and some insurers have tried to encourage more stay-at-home care, and the pandemic has created a sense of urgency.
“What’s happened is a welcome sort of market correction for nursing homes,” said Tony Chicotel, a staff attorney for California Advocates for Nursing Home Reform in San Francisco. Some families, he said, “ended up agreeing to a nursing home without giving it a lot of deliberation,” but after trying home care during the pandemic, many families found keeping an older relative at home was a viable alternative, he said.
I think I'm going to vomit!
Your elderly beloved is in their hands?
Nursing homes rose from the almshouses in England and America that cared for the poor. In the United States, passage of the Social Security Act in 1935 provided money for states to care for the elderly. Thirty years later, the Medicaid program expanded funding, making long-term care homes central to elder care, said Terry Fulmer, president of the John A. Hartford Foundation, an advocacy group for older adults. “If you pay the nursing homes, that’s where you go,” Fulmer said.
It was not until the 1970s that some programs began to pay for home care, and the number of nursing home residents nationwide started to slowly decline, with occupancy levels in recent years flattened to about 80%, according to data from the Kaiser Family Foundation.
New technology makes it easier to monitor someone at home, said Fulmer, who thinks the pandemic might be a “tipping point.”
Beth Kreisman, a nurse who works at Debra D. Feldman & Associates in Buffalo Grove, Illinois, helping families navigate these issues, faced the same dilemma with her stepmother, now 89. Her stepmother had been showing signs of dementia, and a hospital stay last spring “took a lot out of her,” Kreisman said.
“She couldn’t go home by herself,” she said. “We were really in a quandary if she should go to skilled nursing or go home with a caregiver,” but concern about her contracting the virus at a facility persuaded the family to opt for home care. “We were absolutely convinced that if she got COVID, she would die,” Kreisman said.
Now that her stepmother is vaccinated, the family has renewed discussions about whether she would be best served in a nursing home. Her stepmother does not want to leave the home where she spent decades with Kreisman’s late father. “In her mind, if she moves out of her place, then she is leaving my dad,” she said.
“We’ve decided for the time being to keep her home,” she said. Many of her clients are also choosing home care in lieu of a nursing home, but many people do not have a choice because of their financial situation or physical needs. “There’s limited wiggle room in avoiding nursing home care,” said Richard Mollot, executive director of the Long Term Care Community Coalition, a nonprofit group in New York. “You’re not given a lot of time and choices when you leave the hospital,” he said.
“I think people are going to be more cautious and ask more questions before they place a loved one in a nursing home or choose one to go to themselves,” said Lori Smetanka, executive director for the National Consumer Voice for Quality Long-Term Care, a nonprofit group. “People are still worried, to some extent, about their safety.”
While the availability of a COVID vaccine has lessened the risk of a resident becoming ill, some residents and staff members are refusing to be vaccinated, making the environment still potentially dangerous. In Kentucky, an unvaccinated worker recently set off an outbreak, according to a study released last month by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and many families know circumstances can change. Nixon’s family has not ruled out someday having her move into a nursing home. “We’re continuing the journey,” Cooper said, emphasizing that they still viewed long-term nursing homes positively.
Potentially?
Home care costs can be prohibitive. If a person is reliant on Medicaid, the federal-state program, what services are available within the community or at home vary widely, depending on the individual state. In some places, paid home care is capped. “We are already seeing that people with low incomes have fewer choices because of the way the system is structured,” Smetanka said.
The Biden administration has proposed spending $400 billion to address some of the gaps in long-term care by providing more funding under Medicaid for these alternatives, but prospects for President Joe Biden’s $2 trillion package are unclear.
In some areas of the country, staff shortages may limit the available options, said Liz Barlowe, the former president of the Aging Life Care Association, a nonprofit representing senior care professionals. Even with seemingly low occupancy rates, nursing homes may be slow to accept new long-term residents because they do not have enough staffing, and home health agencies have difficulty finding enough aides if people need round-the-clock care. “That is a huge challenge, not only for facilities but also home care,” said Barlowe, who advises families in Seminole, Florida.
Still, she said she has sensed a shift in views on long-term care among families, even as some of the worst of the experiences in nursing homes fade.
The crisis laid bare how poorly equipped many facilities were to handle a pandemic, she said. It also underscored that the industry needs to make fundamental changes to restore the confidence of the country.
“The damage is done,” Barlowe said. “Now we all know it can happen. We need to be looking at system change.”
The problem is it CANNOT be UNDONE!!
{@@##$$%%^^&&}
Time to nurse this blog home and leave these behind:
"Buffeted by COVID-19, struggling with crumbling finances, one of America’s largest nursing home chains gave its CEO a $5.2 million “retention payment” in late October, just as the second big wave of the pandemic was rising. On Jan. 5, nonetheless, George Hager Jr. retired as head of Genesis HealthCare. He will have to pay an unspecified amount of the money back, to avoid certain tax liabilities, according to an SEC filing by the company, but he will apparently be reimbursed over the next two years. The Genesis board also agreed to give him an immediate $650,000 bonus and a $300,000 consulting contract, according to the filing. The company would not elaborate on the arrangement. Under Hager’s leadership the more than 300 Genesis nursing homes experienced 14,352 confirmed cases of COVID-19 through mid-December, according to reports the company made to Medicare officials. The total number of residents who died of the disease was 2,812, as of Dec. 20. Both figures are higher than in comparable nursing home chains. Nearly all of the company’s nursing homes reported continuing shortages of personal protective equipment through the months of the pandemic, according to a Washington Post analysis of Medicare data, with the situation easing only toward the end of November — after Hager’s big payout was approved. Since last summer, Genesis, which has been signaling a financial squeeze since 2017 in its reports to the SEC, has been warning investors it may not be able to continue as a going concern because of high costs and low occupancy rates exacerbated by the pandemic."
I'm $urpri$ed the Globe didn't put a ma$k over that.
"Throughout the pandemic, there has been perhaps nowhere more dangerous than a nursing home. The coronavirus raced through some 31,000 long-term care facilities in the United States, killing more than 163,000 residents and employees — more than one-third of all virus deaths since late spring, but for the first time since the US outbreak began roughly a year ago, at a nursing care center in Kirkland, Wash., the threat at nursing homes may have reached a turning point. Since the arrival of vaccines, which were prioritized to long-term care facilities starting in late December, new cases and deaths in nursing homes, a large subset of long-term-care facilities, have fallen steeply, outpacing national declines, according to a New York Times analysis of federal data. The turnaround is an encouraging sign that vaccines are effective and offers an early glimpse of what may be in store for the rest of the country as more people are vaccinated....."
Think of them as a gift from $anta, even as COVID-19 infections and deaths have dropped at long-term care facilities in Rhode Island, visitors are still restricted, staff is stretched too thin, and the isolation is taking a toll on residents, while California is suing nursing home chain that manipulating the ratings system.
"No corner of Massachusetts life was more devastated by the coronavirus a year ago than long-term care, and none has seen infection rates drop faster since COVID-19 vaccines rolled out at the end of last year. Over the past 12 weeks, nearly all of the 33,000 residents and most of the staff at the state’s nursing and rest homes have gotten at least one shot, and most have been fully inoculated. The seven-day average of virus cases in the homes has tumbled by 93 percent. With state officials lifting restrictions, old friends could sit together again, but even as the deadly virus recedes, the scars of the past year aren’t far from the surface....."
And here I have barely scratched it.
