State Legislature should reform long-term care

In these tough economic times, it has become a calling card for businesses to claim that government regulations are burdensome and unnecessary.

That’s OK when talking about the development of Bluetooth headsets, defining what constitutes interior design or deciding what kind of toilet paper to use at public events. But when real human lives are at stake, it is way out of bounds.

In an Orlando Business Journal earlier this month — “Up to 116 assisted living facilities at risk for closure” — an assisted living facility trade association asserted that 60 percent of Central Florida’s facilities could be driven out of business if forced to pay additional fees. They went on to claim that any further regulation might collapse the industry and result in the loss of 357 jobs and $8 million in annual wages.

Really?

So before any protections for the elderly have been presented by lawmakers, the industry has somehow quantified them, assigned dollar values and decried them all before any have been offered. This kind of forecasting would make meteorologists jealous with envy.

Earlier this year, an investigative series by the Miami Herald exposed cracks, more like gaping chasms, within the state’s regulatory oversight of assisted living facilities. The Herald reported that lax enforcement coupled with operator negligence resulted in some 70 cases of abuse and neglect of residents.

It’s so easy to gloss over that statistic, failing to realize that each of these reported cases involved the injury or death of an elderly or disabled adult. Those cases are our mothers, fathers, grandparents, siblings, neighbors and friends.

In one of those incidents, an 85-year-old woman who suffered from dementia drowned after her facility’s safety measures crumbled. The Department of Children & Families determined that a culmination of foolish blunders (a sleeping caregiver, broken surveillance cameras and alarm doors, and an unlocked gate) led to the woman’s death.

That should never happen in an assisted living facility where this woman or her family was paying to have her protected from these types of events.

Thankfully, our elected officials are zeroing in on this clear-and-present danger. They have responded with ramped-up enforcement, a gubernatorial task force and legislative hearings all in a concerted effort to implement sustainable reform.

It’s time for the long-term care industry to stop with the false choices, empty excuses and meaningless rhetoric and to start proposing real solutions that will improve care and keep our loved ones safe from harm.