Broke nursing homes are closing, kicking out elderly Americans.
Meanwhile, U.S. taxpayers are shelling out $750 per migrant per day at pricey border state shelters.
| The New York Times, Mobridge, S.D. — Harold Labrensz spent much of his 89-year life farming and ranching the rolling Dakota plains along the Missouri River.
His family figured he would die there, too.
But late last year, the nursing home in Mobridge, S.D., that cared for Mr. Labrensz announced that it was shutting down after a rocky history of corporate buyouts, unpaid bills and financial ruin.
It had become one of the many nursing homes across the country that have gone out of business in recent years as beds go empty, money troubles mount and more Americans seek to age in their own homes. [BELOW: No money problems taking care of detained migrants at the border]
For Mr. Labrensz, though, the closure amounted to an eviction order from his hometown.
His wife, Ramona, said she could not find any nursing home nearby to take him, and she could not help him if he took a fall at home.
So one morning in late January, as a snowstorm whited out the prairie, Mr. Labrensz was loaded into the back of a small bus and sent off on a 220-mile road trip to a nursing home in North Dakota.
“He didn’t want to go,” said Mrs. Labrensz, 87, who made the trip with her husband. “When we stopped for gas, he said, ‘Turn this thing around.’ ”
More than 440 rural nursing homes have closed or merged over the last decade, according to the Cowles Research Group, which tracks long-term care, and each closure scattered patients like seeds in the wind.
Instead of finding new care in their homes and communities, many end up at different nursing homes far from their families.
In remote communities like Mobridge, an old railroad town of 3,500 people, there are few choices for an aging population. Home health aides can be scarce and unaffordable to hire around the clock … Read more.
While elderly Americans are kicked out of broke nursing homes, taxpayers spend $750 a day to house each migrant
Shelter services provider derives 88 percent of its revenue from contracts with the federal government.
Feb 20, 2019
ABOVE THE LAW, By JONATHAN WOLF – You can get a fine hotel room at The Roosevelt in New Orleans during the height of Mardi Gras season for just $405.62 a night, including taxes.
But you want to lock up a non-violent foreign child in a tent city? That’s going to run you $750 per day.
Yes, that’s right. For the price U.S. taxpayers pay a for-profit company to house each migrant child in a temporary tent city, we could just about send three of them to Harvard Law School.
Reuters ran a great story last week on the government holding center for migrant youths. The facility has about 1,600 migrant children in it, but its population may boom to as many as 2,350 in the coming months.
Although the site is situated on federal property located about 35 miles outside of Miami, it is operated by a private for-profit company, Comprehensive Health Services. Migrants Want “Better Amenities,” Entry to U.S.
For the teenagers, ages 13-17, school is held in giant white tents. Younger kids sleep in rooms furnished with six sets of bunk beds each, and the separately housed 17-year-olds sleep in what Reuters’ fine reporters diplomatically refer to as “large, long ‘bays’ with 144 beds each.”
A child who winds up at this facility spends an average of 67 days there, according to officials, before being released.
When the kids are released, most of them go to loving family members who want them and have accordingly filed to be their sponsors.
So — let’s do the math on this — at $750 a day, each migrant child who passes through this facility is costing the U.S. taxpayer an average of $50,250. When was the last time the U.S. government spent $50,000 on your kid over the course of two months? Read more.
[The national average per-pupil annual expenditure for public education is $12,526. Source.]