Right-wing Women

death. Their tenacity in holding on to life is held against them.

Cuts in Social Security and food programs for the old directly issue

from the willingness of the U . S. government to watch useless

females go hungry, live in viciously degrading poverty, and die in

squalor. On the television news, social workers tell us several times

a week that old people are going hungry: “they have just enough

food to keep them alive, ” one said, “but they never eat enough to

stop them from being hungry. ” Then we see the interviews with

old people, the cafeterias where old people who can walk go to get

their one meal of the day. T hey are mostly women. T hey say they

are hungry. We can observe, if we care to, that they are female and

hungry.

W ithin this population of the old, there are the people in nursing

homes. “There are more than 17, 000 nursing homes in the United

States— as opposed to roughly 7, 000 general hospitals— and their

aggregate revenues exceed $12 billion a year, ” writes Bruce C.

Vladeck in U nloving Care: The N ursing Home Tragedy. “T hey have

been described as ‘Houses of Death, ’ ‘concentration cam ps, ’ ‘warehouses for the d yin g. ’ It is a documented fact that nursing home residents tend to deteriorate, physically and psychologically, after

being placed in what are presumably therapeutic institutions. The

overuse of potent medications in nursing homes is a scandal in itself. Thousands of facilities in every state of the nation fail to meet minimal government standards of sanitation, staffing, or patient

care. The best governmental estimate is that roughly half the na­

tion’s nursing homes are ‘substandard. ’”4 In 1978, according to

Vladeck, there were still nursing homes “with green meat and

maggots in the kitchen, narcotics in unlocked cabinets, and disconnected sprinklers in nonfire-resistant structures. ” 5 Over 72 percent of the nursing home population is female. Women in nursing

homes are generally widows or never married, white, poorer than

most of their peers (70 percent having incomes under $3000 a year

consisting mainly of Social Security benefits), and have several

chronic diseases. According to The New York Times (October 14,

1979), the average age of the person in such an institution is 82 and

50 percent have no family, get no visitors, and are supported by

government money. Conditions are most terrible in nursing homes

supported by government funding of patient care: nursing homes

for the destitute, for those on Medicaid. The policy of the United

States government is that old people must become paupers: * spend

any money of their own that they have, after which the government takes over; the paupers are unable to defend themselves

*See “Loose Laws Make Care of Aged Costly, ” by Gertrude Dubrovsky,

The New York Times, October 21, 1979. In a subsection called “How the

Programs W ork, ” Dubrovsky explains:

“As of April 1977, the last period for which such figures were available,

a nursing-home patient under Medicaid could not have an income greater

than $533. 39 a month. However, should this same person want to remain

at home and receive community-based health-related services, his monthly

income must be less than $200.

“Thus, Medicaid laws are biased in favor of institutional care.

“Morever, Medicaid imposes strict personal-asset limits of $ 1 , 500 for a