Abandoning Our Elderly
The date is September 21, 2020 and nearly half of all Covid-19 deaths in the U.S. have been linked to nursing homes. How will we remember or honor those we’ve abandoned? Will there be a national day of mourning for our elderly? Why is there no outrage about this shameful failure of leadership, public health policy, and regulatory oversight? Will there be congressional hearings to investigate corruption in the industry? And why did Gov. Cuomo grant immunity to corrupt nursing home executives? Why did new covid-19 protections shield companies from lawsuits?
And only recently have we learned that we’re supporting this private sector, failing industry, with taxpayer dollars. On April 21, 2020 The New York Times reported that the
… is increasingly relying on the government for another form of support: The Department of Housing and Urban Development guarantees $20 billion in mortgages to more than 2,300 nursing homes — about 15 percent of the country’s total, up from about 5 percent a quarter-century ago. (Last year, the $146 million collapse of Rosewood Care Centers was the biggest default in the history of the mortgage-guarantee program.)
Why are there no protests? Why are the headlines muted and infrequent? We should all be outraged. But we’re not! We’ll have more to say about this silence below. For now, let’s look at more of the figures.
Below are the the figures for April 2020. New Jersey was reporting 2500. By July 2, the figure climbed to 6500. The numbers continued to climb. New Jersey reports daily on individual facilities (see this website).
Our Silence? What explains the absence of outrage and protest? Are we now living in a world where millions, hundreds of millions of people, from around the globe are expendable, disposable? Are we living in a time where machines have replaced people. Are the elderly, along with this class of laborers and refugees, disposable? They’re not consumers. They’re not producers. They’re not laborers. This seems to us only a partial explanation. We must also look to the nature of caring in a capitalist society. Have we not so thoroughly commodified caring for the elderly that they’ve been erased, blotted out. What else can explain a NJ Nursing home where 17 bodies were stacked up in a makeshift morgue. What happens when we turn caring into a commodity? And does the pandemic tell us something about what’s happened to caring?