Political Quotes

“along with Senators Chafee, Johnson, Grassley, and Harkin, I will be introducing today the Nursing Home Patient Protection Act. This is legislation to protect our Nation's seniors from indiscriminate patient dumping from nursing homes. Approximately one month ago, it looked like 93-year-old Adela Mongiovi might have to spend her 61st Mother's Day away from the assisted living facility that she had called home for the last four years. At least that's what her son Nelson and daughter-in-law Gina feared when officials at the Rehabilitation and Health Care Center of Tampa told them that their Alzheimer's disease-afflicted mother would have to be relocated so that the nursing home could complete "renovations." As the Mongiovis told me when I met with them and visited their mother in Tampa last month, the real story far exceeded their worst fears. The supposedly temporary relocation was actually a permanent eviction--a permanent eviction of all 52 residents whose housing and care were paid for by the Medicaid program. The nursing home chain that owns the Tampa facility, and several others across the United States, wanted to purge its nursing homes of Medicaid residents, ostensibly to take more private insurance payers and Medicare beneficiaries, which pay more per resident. While this may have been a good financial decision in the short run, its effects on our Nation's senior citizens, if practiced on a widespread basis, would be nothing short of disastrous.”