Pepper Legacy Today
MEMPHIS — When one of Martha Jane Pierce’s sons peeled back the white sock that had been covering his 82-year-old mother’s right foot for a month, he discovered rotting flesh. “It looked like a piece of black charcoal” and smelled “like death,” her daughter Cindy Hatfield later testified. After Mrs. Pierce, a patient at a […]
Nursing homes that rely the most on Medicaid tend to provide the worst care for their residents — not just the people covered by the program but also those who pay privately or have Medicare coverage. Despite the collapse of the latest Senate effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act, congressional Republicans are still keen […]
CHICAGO—For more than two years, around 10,000 Illinois nursing home workers worked without a new union contract—waiting and agitating for a long overdue pay raise and better protection of their rights on the job. Those rights, they argued, would also improve the care of the ill and elderly in their charge. Fed up with the […]
Nearly two million Americans spend an average of 835 days of their lives in one of the 15,700 nursing home facilities in the United States (National Center for Health Statistics 2009). The Department of Health and Human Services estimates that in 2009, 4.1 percent of Americans over 65 years old lived in these facilities. This […]
She was resplendent in purple, from her shoes to her dress to her scarf to the purple feathers on her purple hat. Lucy Kennedy had planned for days what she would wear when the “two important men” came to the nursing home. What she would say to them she had known for months. After the […]
