That was the way things used to be. However, the office of aging types have “gone active”, which means they are on the hunt to find seniors living at home who pass their checklist for being put in nursing homes.
Hospitals are a big part of this. As part of admissions now, there is a standard question: “Do you feel safe where you live?” If they answer “No”, then the government owns them.
They also use other, more arcane criteria. For instance, they cross check what prescriptions elderly people are taking. If they could “potentially debilitate”, then they can argue that they should only be dispensed by a health care worker, in a nursing home.
I’m sure they have all sorts of other formulas. But if an elderly person passes any of their formula, then the mechanism begins to put them under institutional control.
For this and other reasons, elderly people should never go to an Emergency Room or check into a hospital without a younger “bodyguard” to insure they are neither neglected nor fast tracked to state control.
Social workers would rather check on elderly people who rarely fight back over inner city single parent families in the ghetto. I’ve seen social workers assigned to wander the nursing home. In some cases, like having to be there to witness someone signing a power of attorney while in a nursing home, is reasonable. In most cases, like the one in this article, it is not.