[Peace-discuss] Nursing Home Blame

[Randall Cotton]

Much thanks to Ricky for the following News-Gazette letter to the editor:

Blame board for nursing home fiasco
Thursday August 28, 2008

I guess the phrase "revolving door" means nothing in this county. At the
county board meeting last week, our besieged nursing home was not even on
the agenda. Now the same director who couldn't manage the place properly
as a public employee is set to run the home for the for-profit management
firm that has taken over the facility.

He's doing so without the legally required board approval, which seems to
satisfy the board majority. The fact that this same director took the
nursing home budget from a rich surplus to a desperate deficit within two
years is apparently not a problem. Could this be the reason they don't
want an open discussion about it?

Of course it was ultimately the board's decision to underfund the nursing
home. Why? As a method it's tried and true. Step one, find a community
resource that is popular and successful, and quickly appoint or engineer a
hostile takeover. Step two, run it into the ground. Step three, argue
without a trace of irony that the resource is so poorly managed that the
only solution is privatization.

It's called "creating facts on the ground," and it's especially effective
at - as the song says - "robbing with a fountain pen."

Reprehensible as it always is to snatch up shared resources for individual
profit, it's particularly sick when the target is a home for the elderly
of modest income. The board should be held accountable for this travesty.

RICKY BALDWIN