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Edited on Mon Nov-21-05 10:54 PM by Divernan
I worked with the system in Pennsylvania, when the group home associations (they are officially "non-profit", but all that means is that the owners keep all the profits and don't have stockholders),
lobbied successfully to shut down the state-run (with well trained and well-paid unionized employees) centers for the mentally retarded, including the autistic. This happened while Tom Ridge was Governor and the Republicans controlled both the House and Senate. One very decent Republican representative who was chairman of the Committee holding special hearings on this subject, and who sided with the families who wanted to keep their realtives in state centers, was snubbed by Ridge and other GOP party leaders, who encouraged opposition to run against him in the primary.
State centers had physicians and dentists specially experienced in handling adult mentally retarded patients. After privatization, the residents were shipped out to little cheaply bought houses - often in very remote areas, where they were limited to fenced in yards on 1/4 acre lots. Local dentists, doctors -especially ob/gyns, did not want these retarded people in their waiting rooms, alarming the other patients. And the local medical people just didn't know how to interact with the mentally retarded, who could become violent if frightened by strangers touching them intimately.
There was an incredibly high turnover rate in the "caregivers"; often the group home operators "forgot" to run criminal background checks because the jobs were so difficult and low paid that only MacDonald's rejects would take them and then only until they could find any other job. The two places these group home operators make their profits on are in purchase of food, and in understaffing and low paying their "help". In the state centers there were dieticians who kept track that every resident was eating properly balanced meals- monitoring weights for gains or losses. In the group homes, some workers killed one resident by putting regular food into her feeding tube.
The group home new hires could go right to work, even without the very minimal training they were supposed to receive in how to handle mentally retarded adults. Death rates shot up drastically in the group "home" settings, as compared to the state centers. In Pennsylvania the Dept. of Public Welfare had oversight. Their regulations were a toothless joke, and even those were not enforced. Under these regulations, the families of the retarded were not told anything about the condition of the retarded, unless they died. Group home residents ran away, or were attacked by other residents, or were raped, or were hospitalized for things like pneumonia or broken bones from falls, or burns, or poisoning, and the family members were not informed. The homes were not even inspected every year, and often not inspected at all. At one home, four residents became very ill when they drank some insecticide they found in a bottle under the sink. According to the regs, nothing like that should have been anywhere on the premises. The place was never even shut down, and the owner was not even fined.
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