Kicking out old people because they’re on Medicaid?

LSB: Profits ahead of people. Is this how we are to treat our elders? What has happened to us?

Act Against Eviction:

Eleven residents of Victoria House in Port Townsend, Washington State, (some in their 90s) are being evicted from the assisted living facility with 90 days notice. Why? Because the Victoria House management company, has decided to stop accepting Medicaid, and there is no law in Washington that makes them have to stick with their agreements with tenants.

Yup. They can just kick ‘em out.

The same company kicked out all the Medicaid patients from their Oregon facilities last year. Community action got together, and now Oregon has a law, like the one in Illinois, that prohibits such practices.

The company has the Orwellian name of “Assisted Living Concepts” and their motto is “Life Just Got Easier”. No, really. And this is a deliberate business decision on the part of a company that says they are committed to eldercare. Elder Law Answers says, “Over the next five years, company officials say they plan on having their 1,800 remaining Medicaid recipients move out, either voluntarily as they choose to move into other assisted living facilities or nursing homes, or involuntarily through evictions.”

Assisted Living Concepts’ chief executive officer Laurie Bebo said the company filed for bankruptcy twice in the 1990s and is now moving toward serving only private-pay residents in part because it does not want to undergo a third bankruptcy… Even with Medicaid residents in its facilities, Assisted Living Concepts made about 24 percent more in fourth-quarter earnings in 2007 than it did in 2006.