PITTSBURGH, Penn.–Elaine Carrington moved into the Lemington Home for the Aged in Pittsburgh in November 2004. She died three weeks later of a blood clot in her lungs. An investigation by the state found that the staff had failed to give Carrington any of her 10 prescription drugs for 20 days before her death. The Pennsylvania Department of PublicWelfare (DPW) fined Lemington $8,100 and put the home on a three-month probation.
In April 2005, Lemington filed for bankruptcy and in July of that year, shut its doors for good. A subsequent lawsuit watched by nonprofit nursing homes
But what happened to Lemington is not uncommon. Researchers at Brown University found that more than 600 other nursing homes in African American, Hispanic and low-income neighborhoods also went bankrupt during this period.
Their study examined the closings of more than 1,700 independent nursing homes between 1999-2009 and found that those located in largely ethinc and low-income communities were more likely to have been closed, mostly because of financial difficulties.
Specifically, nursing homes in the zip codes with the highest percentage of blacks and Latinos were more than one-third more likely to be closed, and the risk of closure in zip codes with the highest level of poverty was more than double that of those in zip codes with the lowest poverty rate.
Medicaid Homes Can’t Compete
The principal authors of the study, Vincent Mor and Zhanlian Feng, both of Brown at the time (Feng is now at the Research Triangle Institute), noted “closures were more likely to occur among facilities in states providing lower Medicaid nursing home reimbursement rates.” That left these homes without the resources they needed to compete successfully in an industry experiencing an oversupply of beds and intensified competition.
One could argue that the blood clot was not the fundamental cause of Carrington’s death and that the incidents that led to Lemington’s bankruptcy were inevitable outcomes of Medicaid policies rooted in racism.
