How Much Do We Spend on Nursing Homes?
Tuesday, June 17th, 2008.
New York, NY - We know that as a nation, we invest well over $2 trillion each year in healthcare. But where exactly do our health care dollars go? Where are they well-spent and where are they wasted?
The news is almost as depressing as The Savages. (A powerful film, starring Philip Seymour Hoffman, Laura Linney, and Philip Bosco about a brother and sister who are faced with putting their father in a nursing home.)
Begin with a recent GAO report. Last month the Government Accountability Office reported that when Congressional investigators double-checked nursing home reports from state inspectors, they found widespread “understatement of deficiencies,” including malnutrition, severe bedsores, overuse of prescription medications and abuse of nursing home residents.” (According to GAO the nine states most likely to miss serious deficiencies were Alabama, Arizona, Missouri, New Mexico, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee and Wyoming.) Nationwide, fully one-fifth of the homes were cited for serious deficiencies last year.
Read the full text of the article >>
« Nursing Home Abuse News Main Page.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.