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.
<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.
We have a wellness program at work and it has questions like the above, as well as ‘what can you do’ kinds of things - like moving furniture, dressing, bathing, cooking, etc. At first glance, you think they are trying to determine your general health (a lot of people will say they are ‘fine,’ when they have to crawl to the bathroom each morning, for example), but when you think again, who knows what your answers will get you? Maybe older workers should think twice about answering questions like this.
Jeez. You can’t even be sick anymore without some government agency trying to mess with you.
One hundred percent agreement. My mother-in-law, 84, was in the hospital last week for GI bleeding. One of us kept an eye on her at all times for a few days, although we weren't allowed to stay overnight. After the bleeding cleared up they wanted to keep her for "a few more days" for a urinary tract infection (probably from catheterization). Then a social worker showed up claiming she had dementia and needed to be moved into an assisted living home. She wasn't speaking clearly because she hadn't had any liquid to drink for 12 hours. We checked her out against the Doctors advice and she is doing fine. (BTW, if they ever tell you that if you check out against a Doctors advice that your insurance won't pay, it is not true.) I'm grateful to the ER Docs and Nurses who gave her a transfusion and saved her life, but get them out of the hospital as fast as you can.