single person or $ 2 , 500 for a couple.
“To be accepted by a nursing home under Medicaid, a person must sell
his home, liquidate his assets and turn them over to Medicaid as a gift, in
which case he stays on Medicaid.
“Or, he may give the funds directly to the nursing home as a private
payment until the money falls below the allowable level. When that happens, the patient reapplies for Medicaid, but may be put on a waiting list. ”
against the conditions in the homes in which they are kept. Once
paupers, they must accept confinement on the state’s terms because
they have no money and nowhere to go. The state’s terms all too
frequently are neglect, degradation, filth, and not infrequently outright sadism.
The nursing home population is markedly white. Blacks die
younger than whites in the United States— perhaps the result of
systematic racism, which means inadequate health care, shelter,
and money over a lifetime. Blacks alone comprise a full 11. 8 percent of the U . S. population and yet only 9 percent of the old are people of color, including Asians, Native Americans, and Hispanics. N ationally, so-called nonwhites (including blacks) comprise
only 5 percent of the nursing home population. In New Jersey, for
instance, according to
of 8, 683 beds in eighty nursing homes, blacks occupied 532 and
Hispanics or “others” occupied 38 (6. 5 percent). It seems that
blacks especially are left to suffer the diseases of old age on their
own and to die on their own; and that whites are institutionally
maintained in appalling conditions— kept alive but barely. If this is
true, the social function of nursing homes becomes clearer: out of
sight, out of mind. Blacks are already invisible in ghettos— young,
middle-aged, old. Black women have been socially segregated and
marginalized all their lives. Perceptions of their suffering are easily
avoided by an already callous white-supremacist populace, the so-
called mainstream. It is white women who have become poor and
extraneous with old age; they are taken from mainstream communities where they are useless and dumped in nursing homes. It is important to keep them away from those eager, young, middle-class white women who might be demoralized at what is in store
for them once they cease to be useful. Kept in institutions until
they die as a punishment for having lived so long, for having outlived their sex-appropriate work, old white women find themselves drugged (6 . 1 prescriptions for an average patient, more than half
the patients given drugs like Thorazine and Mellaril); sick from
neglect with bedsores, urinary, eye, and ear infections; left lying in
their own filth, tied into so-called geriatric chairs or tied into bed;
sometimes not fed, not given heat, not given any nursing care;
sometimes left in burning baths (from which there have been
drownings); sometimes beaten and left with broken bones. Even in
old age, a woman had better have a man to protect her. She has
earned no place in society on her own. With a man, she will most
likely not end up in a prison for the female old. She has more social
value if she has a man, no matter how old she is—and she will also
have more money. After a lifetime of systematic economic discrimination—no pay for housekeeping, lower pay for salaried work, lower Social Security benefits, often with no rights to her husband’s pension or other benefits even after decades of marriage if he has left her—a woman alone is virtually resourceless. The euphemistically named “displaced homemaker” foreshadows the old woman who is put
