The Progressive Magazine: I Want to go Home (January 28, 2022)

All over the country, nursing homes and senior care facilities are breaking the law, evicting elderly residents, and getting away with it. Laws  on the books at the federal and state level are routinely ignored without serious consequence. Federal agencies have known for years that improper discharges are a problem, yet the laws against them have been allowed to atrophy into irrelevance, due to a lack of enforcement.

Eric Carlson, directing attorney with Justice in Aging, a Los Angeles-based advocacy group, says assertions that a facility can no longer meet the care needs of a particular resident are “usually inappropriate.” In most cases when this is alleged, “the resident is still within the facility’s level of care. The resident may not be a particularly easy resident. They may have greater care needs than most residents. But they’re still within the level of care that the facility is licensed and certified to provide.”