By GILLIAN FLACCUS, Associated Press Writer
SANTA ANA, Calif. – Staffing was so inadequate at a California senior center that a rat crawled into an Alzheimer’s patient’s mouth and died there before staff noticed, a lawsuit claims.
The lawsuit, filed Thursday on behalf of 90-year-old Sigmund Bock, alleges that administrators at the Paragon Gardens Assisted Living and Memory Care Community in Mission Viejo overbooked their facility to receive corporate bonuses, but cut back on staff to increase profits.
“The facility so literally ignored the needs of their residents … as to allow vermin in the form of a rat to become lodged in the mouth of Sigmund Bock and die therein,” the lawsuit alleges.
Melody Chatelle, a spokeswoman for Sunwest Management Inc., the Oregon-based company that operates Paragon, denied the allegations.
“We take care of our residents, and find this negative publicity to be a disheartening affront to our professional caregivers and most especially to our residents and their loved ones,” she said.
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Of course, the nursing home claims they did nothing wrong, but apparently a staff member observed that patient sharing candy with a rat earlier that day, but thought nothing of it and did nothing to stop it.
This is not the first time that particular nursing home has gotten into trouble, either. Apparently they almost got their ticket pulled when a 71-year-old dementia patient wandered off last year. Tragically, that patient has never been found.
This kind of stuff just majorly pisses me off. Nursing homes like that one must choose their staff by leaving them alone in a room with a small puppy, to make sure they’ll torture it.
Some big problems leading to what happened here:
1) The larger effect of taxes and regulations to artificially limit competition
2) The assumption that government regulation prevents such problems, and the deleterious effect this has on private rating and reporting agencies.
3) Not sure if this applies here, but a good chance it does: limited liability.
We could also talk about the destruction of traditional private social safety networks (read: friends and family) by the rise of the welfare state. Who needs friends and family when you’ll never need them to meet your fiscal obligations? You have the almighty state to turn to. They’ll give you money if you need it. You don’t have to stay with your sons when you’re old, you don’t have to take in a friend if he’s out of a job. The money for all of that is taken out of you by implied gunpoint so nobody has to give it willingly and lovingly anymore.
There’s a growing lack of love in society, a growing lack of give-a-damn for one another, and it’s because the welfare state has destroyed the voluntary social bonds that tied us to one another, replacing them with coercive ones. So why does anyone have to put their aged parents up when you can just pay for a home? No institution, public or private, is going to give a damn as well as flesh and blood. And yeah, while there’s not an actual government program to put old people in homes (yet), there’s programs for every damn thing else… so this obligation has likewise been outsourced from friends and family. It hasn’t made it to the government yet, but the private sector’s nursing homes are feeding off the government nonetheless.
I will never go to a home-I’d rather die.
Yep. That too.
i’m just going to try to quit having birthdays. that’s what really messes people up.