The Guardian US Edition: Transfer trauma: America’s seniors suffer as care system pushes them between sites

Unequal payment plans drive some corporate nursing home facilities to shed – or in some cases ‘hospital dump’ – residents, distressing delicate elders

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/may/27/elder-care-us-nursing-homes-transfer-trauma

Transfer trauma, a nonclinical term for what elders experience when they are moved from one facility to another, is something elder care advocates see families confront every day. “It’s extremely common,” Eric Carlson of Justice in Aging said. “It’s a very dangerous point in the life of a nursing facility resident when the Medicare has ended.”

Nursing home managers who are pressured by owners to maximize profits regularly evict residents who need too much care or are coming to the end of their Medicare reimbursements. Federal regulations require that facilities help residents to apply for Medicaid, which would enable them to stay on in the facility but would reimburse that facility at a lower rate. Facilities are instead routinely forcing vulnerable and uninformed elders out.

SOS would say that Pacifica Companies’ announcement of their desire to convert to the Sakura Intermediate Care Facility into a “more profitable” high-rent building without any concern for where the current 80’s-100+ year-old residents would live amounts to a variation of the senior abuse that has reached epidemic proportions throughout the current system.