No Respite for Racial Minorities, Even After Retirement

By Cheryl Liu

Aug 2, 2019

Li Li Fang, 89, has lived in her apartment on Lafayette Street for 25 years. She consumes a mountain of pills every day to combat her Type II diabetes, high cholesterol, dementia and heart palpitations. Within the past month, she has visited the recovery ward of New York Presbyterian Hospital twice. She needs care round the clock, yet has scared off her last eight nurses, leaving her children with no option but to turn towards retirement homes, where Fang’s woes will only multiply.

Across the country, millions of immigrant families, like Fang’s, are faced with the same dilemma. As more and more baby boomers retire, many of them are in need of geriatric facilities which have in recent times received a lot of bad press. With countless horror stories and firsthand accounts of residents being abused and mistreated, senior care units are often a last resort for many families.

While affluent, white senior citizens are able to afford quality privatized medicare and, thus, stay out of nursing homes, those from racial minorities do not enjoy the same benefits. Assisted living facilities are an alternative route to nursing homes that the wealthy take advantage of. These facilities remain unassessable to minorities because they are paid for by privatized medicaid which the affluent can afford and located in neighborhoods for the rich.

A 2011 study from Brown University shows that by the year 2050, the percentages of Asian, Latino, and Black residents within nursing homes will increase by 54.9 percent, 54.2 percent, and 10.5 percent respectively; while the number of white residents within these same facilities will decline by 10 percent.

Throughout the 1980’s, white residents were the major occupants of nursing homes. Then, government agencies attempted to resolve them such as seen within the case of Hickman v. Fowinkle where residents of Shelby County, Tennessee sued the state’s Department of Human Services and Public Health along with 12 nursing homes, arguing that Medicaid approved nursing homes were rejecting them and reallocating them to “inferior unlicensed boarding homes.” They won the lawsuit and the Tennessee Medicaid Agency came under investigation and had to reveal confidential documents.

According to the New York Times, white Americans often reside in more affluent communities, and are thus able to afford care options that minorities simply cannot. Furthermore, when the wealthy do end up in nursing homes their treatment is usually better. Wealthier patrons are able to pay for a better experience. They can afford to be placed in better facilities and tip their way to better treatment from the staff. On the other hand, rural nursing homes meant to house minorities are often threatened with closures, so they try to make the best of the resources that they have. Their staff are overburdened with the workload. Mary, 64, has been a nurse for 40 years. “It is very stressful. I almost always have 30–60 patients under my care at once,” she said. “I need to feed, cloth, and bath all of them.”

Recently the government has attempted to “rebalance” the geriatric industry by directing Medicaid funds away from nursing homes and towards community-based organizations. Although it is a step in the right direction, but as Dr Zhan Jian Feng of the Center for Gerontology and Health Care Research at Brown University told the New York Times, “The disparities are still there and are deeply rooted in history, geography, segregation and socioeconomic differences.”