Oregon Hospitals Didn't Have Shortages. So Why Were Disabled People Denied Care?

investigative report by Joseph Shapiro @ NPR.org, Dec. 21 (7 min. audio available as well as text

At the start of the coronavirus pandemic, a small group of disability rights advocates found itself in a race against time to save the life of a woman with an intellectual disability.

The woman was taken to the hospital with COVID-19. But the hospital, in a small Oregon town, denied the ventilator she needed. Instead, a doctor, citing her "low quality of life," wanted her to sign a legal form to allow the hospital to deny her care.

Out of that quiet fight in early spring, the advocates — staff at a disability rights legal group, a state lawmaker and a few others — discovered something disturbing: There were many cases in Oregon of health care being rationed to people with disabilities.

At the same moment, across the United States, disability groups and even a civil rights office of the U.S. government were raising a similar warning: that behind closed doors, people with disabilities, as well as elderly people, were in danger of being denied health care.

NPR was looking for cases, too, and heard about the woman in Pendleton while she was in the hospital.

There's no reason that these examples would occur more frequently in Oregon than in other states. But the fight for that anonymous woman with an intellectual disability peeled back the curtain on health care decision-making in Oregon in a way that did not happen in other states.

That activism led to change in Oregon — including anti-discrimination legislation and new statewide policies.

It was late March when the woman with an intellectual disability contracted COVID-19. She struggled to breathe. In the hospital, a medical provider wrote do-not-resuscitate (DNR) and do-not-intubate orders for the woman [....]

MORE RELATED HERE:

As Hospitals Fear Being Overwhelmed By COVID-19, Do The Disabled Get The Same Access?

One Man's COVID-19 Death Raises The Worst Fears Of Many People With Disabilities

new variant spreading worldwide like crazy:

accusation of vaccine distribution fraud already a reality:

After surviving the Depression, the Blitz and the Nazis, writers reflect on the pandemic

Members of a workshop group in Manhattan – average age of 87 – take the long view and provide a welcome dose of perspective

By Amanda Holpuch in NY @ TheGuardian.com, Dec. 29

Late at night, Peggy Strait sits at her computer and thinks about the dangers of living in New York city during a pandemic.

Then she remembers her life in 1937.

The 87-year-old writes: “As I begin to think about actually leaving New York City and what I must pack for the trip, I thought of the day in 1937 when Japanese warplanes flew over China.

“My father’s reaction was immediate and decisive. He withdrew as much money as he could from his bank, packed it into a suitcase, then hurried home to get his wife and five children.

“We left Canton, China that evening for Hong Kong.”

Every other week, Strait shares these memories and reflects with a group of her peers in the Writing From Life Experience workshop in Manhattan, where she has lived for more than six decades.

They talk about their childhoods in Nazi Germany and the Liverpool Blitz, as well as the smaller, more personal tragedies and triumphs that fill a lifetime.

The pandemic poses a much greater risk to the writing group than most – their median age is 87 – and in an extraordinary year like 2020, their work provides a welcome dose of perspective [....]

This Is Why Nursing Homes Failed So Badly

The first coronavirus outbreak in the United States happened in a nursing home in February. Since then, it’s only gotten worse.

By E. Tammy Kim, Contributing Opinion Writer @ NYTimes.com Dec. 31, 2020

excerpt is only middle 1/3, is an extensive article, wouldn't classify it as just another op-ed! (starts with a lot of nightmare stories and a gruesome graph)

[....] A few weeks ago, nursing home workers and residents began to receive vaccinations for the coronavirus, but even full immunization will not allay the tragedy that has unfolded in long-term care — not just the deaths, but also the isolation and neglect.

Lori Smetanka, the executive director of the National Consumer Voice for Quality Long-Term Care, an advocacy nonprofit, told me stories of nursing home residents who’ve gone weeks without being showered or having their teeth brushed. Residents with dementia have suffered terribly from a lack of human contact, leading to depression and loss of weight, mobility and speech.

Sharon Wallace, 62, whose multiple sclerosis landed her in a Rockland County, N.Y., nursing home several years ago, said that an unattended rash recently turned into an open wound, and she described feeling lonely and trapped in quarantine. “I feel like my health is going downhill,” she told me.

When the pandemic is finally history, we’ll need to deal with all of this: the staffing shortages, low pay and lack of accountability — the many ways we have failed residents, family members and staffers. The awful truth is that long-term care was designed to fail years before Covid-19.

Over the past few decades, the popularity of “aging in place,” combined with new medical technologies and longer life spans, has changed the nature of care for seniors and people with disabilities. Residents of the nation’s 15,400 C.M.S.-certified nursing homes are much older, sicker and poorer than they used to be.

“Nursing homes are really little hospitals, yet they’re not staffed like it. If you asked an I.C.U. nurse to take care of 15 people, she’d laugh at you, but that’s essentially what we have,” Chris Laxton, the executive director of AMDA, the Society for Post-Acute and Long-Term Care Medicine, told me.

At the same time, many of these caregivers “are making $12 or $13 an hour,” Alice Bonner, of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, said. “They can barely support themselves and their families. Some of them are working in nursing homes during the day, then assisted living in the evening and home health at night.”

As a result, workers probably helped spread the virus from facility to facility, home to home. And residents may have done the same. Depending on their condition, it’s not uncommon for a senior or a person with disabilities to go from assisted living to a hospital to a nursing home within a few months’ time.

Early on, when the coronavirus was killing mostly older adults, there was a sense of relief that the young might be spared. Nursing home residents were shut off from ordinary life; they were going to die anyway, commentators implied. And the workers who were getting sick — they weren’t health professionals but glorified babysitters with minimum-wage qualifications. Weren’t illness and death their lot?

A week after the outbreak near Seattle (and months after the first cases in China), C.M.S., run by Seema Verma, whose conflicts of interest outnumber her credentials, began to act. But some of the agency’s decisions merely amplified existing problems.

Under President Trump, C.M.S. had already cut monetary fines for facilities with health and safety violations. Now it called off regular inspections in favor of a narrow, superficial infection-control survey. It also allowed for “temporary nursing assistants” with little training to fill in for certified aides.

When Congress allocated $5 billion under the CARES Act to help struggling long-term care facilities, a dozen companies accused of labor violations and Medicare fraud received more than $300 million in no-strings-attached relief. It wasn’t until late summer that C.M.S. mandated testing for residents and workers.

Nursing home operators have long complained that Medicaid doesn’t pay them enough to provide adequate care, but the business is not, apparently, a bad one to be in. Two-thirds of nursing homes are for-profits, and the sector has been swallowed up by corporate chains and investment firms whose involvement correlates to lower staffing and worse care.

Now the industry is pleading poverty while paying lobbyists to seek protection from lawsuits. In more than half the states, long-term care providers are shielded from liability for Covid-19 claims brought by residents, workers or their families, and legislation that would extend such immunity nationwide is pending.

Proponents of the protections, like Mark Parkinson, [....]

We are so screwed. I can't imagine how someone like Fauci can even stand dealing with our societies in the situation we are in: