EVICTING THE ELDERLY.

• Author: Lueders, Bill
• Position: EDITOR'S NOTE

In our December/January issue, I used my "Editor's Note" to tell you about how my mother, Elaine Benz, was evicted from her senior living facility at age ninety-seven. I noted that she was not allowed to return after a brief stay at another facility, forcing my family to scramble to find a new place for her to live. And I promised you an "update" on the situation in this issue.

That update ended up being the article we present here, '"I Want to Go Home.'" At more than 8,500 words, it is perhaps the longest article in The Progressive's 113-year history, and certainly in recent years. It became a big story when I found out, quite unexpectedly, that the eviction of elderly people from their nursing homes and senior living facilities is a huge national problem.

In mid-November, as the drama involving my mom was playing out, the Office of Inspector General for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services put out a major report on "facility-initiated discharges," or forced evictions, in long-term care facilities. It noted that "discharge/eviction" has for years been the single most frequent complaint recorded by the federal Long-Term Care Ombudsman Program, which works to resolve problems in these facilities.

In one case cited in the report, "police found one resident on the streets after a nursing home discharged him to an unlicensed boarding house without notifying his family." I spoke to an attorney in Michigan who said her group has seen cases in which elderly residents were approved for discharges to a homeless shelter and to a house that had burned down. Multiple sources told me that evictions often occur when a resident gets sent to the hospital, sometimes at the facility's instigation, as happened with my mom.

In 2019, there were more than 13,000 discharge-related complaints received by ombudsmen nationally, and available numbers suggest that the problem is on the rise. The reason for this, advocates agree, is that there are seldom any negative consequences for facilities that evict elderly residents, even when they do so in ways that clearly violate the law--either at the federal level for nursing homes or at the state level for other kinds of facilities.

"The benefits of breaking the law are greater than the cost of breaking the law," says Tony Chicotel of California Advocates for Nursing Home Reform. "So, consequently, you get a lot...