Ours Elders Deserve Better

By Martha Burk EGPNews.Com 5-28-09

The month of May is almost behind us, and with it the flowers and candy many of us showered on our mothers earlier in the month to mark Mother’s Day. But many older mothers are getting showered with attention of another kind – abuse.

Take the case of Ruth, an 89-year-old woman who was in fairly good health when she entered an Iowa nursing home for physical therapy in 2008. When she left to go home 25 days later, Ruth’s leg was rotting and consumed by gangrene. She died three months later. State and federal officials rightly called it neglect, and fined the nursing home $112,650.

25 years of congressional hearings on its devastating effects have produced no federal law to address the problem in a comprehensive manner, even though elder-battering has been called both a disgrace and a “burgeoning national scandal.”

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