This is an opinion column.
I walked along the magic of a pig in Alabama a few weeks ago.
It was like every item in the condiment aisle was stolen by an alien and replaced with an exact replica. It's accurate but small. I stumbled, after the aisle, and it seemed everything was a mini.
I took a photo and sent it to my wife and asked if I was imagining the whole thing. But that didn't help. If many of the shelves are pocket-sized, the photos of the shelves will look like they are shelves.
The truth is that I have begun to doubt my sanity, my reality. How can this change occur? How long does it take? Did they always sell pickles in caper jars?
Where was your anger? I couldn't imagine America simply taking a walk through all that systematic reduction and paying quietly less.
Unless we are all out-mart.
That's what I thought when I read a series of stories called The Hunger Games about cases of greed and hunger in nursing homes across the United States. This was written by colleagues at Advance Local with the help of academics and data analysts.
It is thorough and meticulous to many nursing home owners who play the system for profit. It's about deception and reduction. Especially when it comes to food and lack of it, if it serves many residents. There is an image in the story that I can't get out of my head. Of hungry residents staring at a plate holding one lonely ravioli.
Eat, grandma.
Certainly, we are shrinking the golden age. But there's more to it. More than nursing home owners see residents scamming residents and seeing less parts and cheaper cuts. They are scaming us all. Some of them, of course, are terrible, but there are plenty, but for years they've been bleeding their care facility budgets so they look like a money hole.
Read: How Some Nursing Facilities Focus Cash on Sister Company
They can whine to the government, and to the children of ravioli-eating people, that they need more federal money to provide better care. Even if over a third of Medicare money sent to nursing homes appears in sister companies in the last five years.
Read: Some nursing homes feed residents for less than $10 a day. Is someone watching?
Sharks are now mainstream, and 3-cardmonte is a corporate strategy.
This will give you a clear summary or outline of that nursing home project. It's too involved in this type of simplification. But that's a reasonable takeaway. It is the intestinal sensation that is becoming too common in society.
Railways on reducing government waste and reimbursements from regulators. And turn a blind eye to those who are hiding from regulations. We deify those who become wealthy on the backs of those who care for them, and taxes intended to ensure a better life for them. Certainly they have to… be smart.
So if an 80-year-old has to eat solo ravioli for dinner, that's right. If your grandmother has to live with $10 a day of food, like many people, times is often difficult. And if a man suffocated from a lump of meat, as there were not enough nursing home staff left to cut it off? Well, he had a good life. probably.
That's outrageous. And it's Americans like a shelf full of small pickle jars or a slightly smaller bag of treats of slightly smaller dogs.
Smart business, is that so? Or something else.
As one state official in Jersey said, it's a multi-billion dollar “mall” game.
And “greed is at the heart of the problem.”
Do you think?
John Archibald is a two-time Pulitzer winner on AL.com. Click here to learn more about his column.
