There are more than half a million Iowans age 65 and older, including my wife and me. That’s about 16 percent of the total population in Iowa. Many older Iowans live in assisted care facilities, nursing homes or other kinds of group living arrangements. It’s critical that these care facilities and staff not only follow the law, but provide the type of care they would want their own family members to receive.
The Des Moines Register recently published reports revealing a disturbing lack of professional and compassionate care for elderly residents in some of Iowa’s nursing homes. Particularly heartbreaking is the case of one nursing home resident who passed away seemingly due to lapses in care at the facility. This type of situation should never happen and is preventable.
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In light of these reports, I’ve asked the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services for more information into what happened and what steps will be taken moving forward to stop it from happening to anyone else. This is the most recent case out of many that I’ve contacted CMS about regarding abuse and neglect at nursing homes.
Last fall, I pressed CMS for answers on why it failed to ensure that nursing home abuse and neglect cases are reported to law enforcement, as required, as well as its lack of urgency in responding to an early alert from the agency watchdog on the problem. Three of 134 incidents of abuse and neglect in 33 states identified by the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General were in Iowa.
Reports also surfaced last year of nursing home workers in at least 18 different facilities taking unauthorized and humiliating photos of elderly residents and posting them on social media websites, such as Snapchat. Six of these incidents occurred in Iowa. In my capacity as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, I called on Snapchat and other social media companies to look into this problem and do more to stop it. Snapchat developed better tools to report abuse in the months that followed. I also sought answers from HHS, leading the agency’s inspector general to alert 50 State Medicaid Fraud Control Units to be on high alert of the problem and investigate all allegations of abuse. Following my call to action, federal regulators issued a detailed memo spelling out social media exploitation as a prohibited form of abuse.
Reporting incidents and increasing transparency are necessary because reporting is key to enforcement, and enforcement is key to prevention. Nursing homes in Iowa and throughout the country need to be sure they’re doing everything possible to prevent exploitation, abuse and neglect of their elderly residents. If they fail, they must face severe consequences.