I am a quadriplegic and I have been in a nursing home for almost 2 years, and this place, this experiene has completely changed me, it's almost like the people in here are the "sights that are unseen, unheard and forgotten."
Many of them have no visitors, and they lie in bed or sit in the hallways by themselves for hours. These are our grandmothers and grandfathers, aunts and uncles, sisters and brothers, World War II, Vietnam and even Iraq and Afghanistan veterans and many have just been left to die.
There is no electronic monitoring for bed-bound patents. What we do have is a call button that we can push when we need help but the ratio of nurses and CNA's is 12-15 to 1, and that's exactly 4 min. per patient per hour. In a 8 hour shift the 7 to 3 staff have to bathe, dress, and feed many total care patients, and those 4 minutes are assuming the staff is moving non-stop, teleporting from patient to patient.
It's next to impossible for the staff to provide a decent quality of care when all they have is 4 min. to give it and Medicare wants to cut back MORE! I'm sorry but all people suffering deserve care, and I know there are people in Africa, Haiti and Japan and they need help, but we as a Nation need to take care of our own people first. Where are the commercials, Documentaries, and newspaper articles about the unbathed, dirty, hungry and lonely US citizens in nursing homes and how much they need help?
"MY" federal government can feed other countries and help other people. But they cannot, or will-not help me. Whatever happened to the saying on the Statue of Liberty "give us your poor, your tired, your huddled masses longing to be free." It's sad that right now my government can't or won't even take care of it's own, our own sick, tired, huddled masses and just to add insult to injury I am in a facility owned by the Seventh-day Adventists and I can't get better here.
Just so you know I'm not some bitter welfare recipient that's crying because I can't get my medication, I just got finished reading the United States Census on foreign aid. From 2001 to 2007. The govt. gave out roughly $80 billion in foreign aid, both economic and military, then in 2008 they gave our roughly $50 billion to the same major recipients.(1.) At the same time budget cuts to Medicare and Social Security in 2012 will be roughly $50 billion. It's interesting that they give out almost exactly the same amount that they want to cut from their own citizens. You and I.
The saddest truth of all of this is that we the people of the united states of America lives in a representative democracy, and we do not represent ourselves, but All it takes is for you to put your foot/Wheels/prosthetic, whatever you have, put it down, down and demand what we are owed. These are our tax dollars and they are giving them away, and then putting cuts in the money that we need to help ourselves, it's unforgivable and has to stop. Below is the chart where the government just thinks that because were such sheep that will look at it and go "oh well."
http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2011/tables/11s1298.pdf
