NURSING HOMES: HIGH TIME FOR LOOSER VISITATION

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, MAY 4, 2021, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
     “NURSING HOMES: HIGH TIME FOR LOOSER VISITATION”

 

        It is high time nursing homes loosen up and abandon most of the pandemic-induced rules that have limited visitors to nearly none for more than a year.

 

        Similarly, assisted living homes that have prevented their residents from venturing into the rest of the world on pain of two week quarantines within their rooms when they return also need to get sensible.

 

        Those rules seemed reasonable during the height of the coronavirus surges that plagued this nation starting in March 2020.

 

        They appeared prudent at first, but only until the infections afflicting and killing more nursing home residents than people in any other living arrangement made it crystal clear that the restrictions were not working. Those rules always presumed that isolating denizens of nursing homes would prevent them from infecting one other.

 

 

        Yet, they became infected and died by the hundreds of thousands over the last 15 months anyhow. That happened because while residents and patients could be isolated, the staffers caring for them could not. Nursing home workers at all levels from the lowliest aides to top-ranking facility directors went out into the world. Like everyone else, some isolated themselves carefully at home and did not venture into bars or onto crowded beaches. Some went to those places. Some masked whenever they were not at home, others didn’t bother except in grocery stores and places where masking was required for entry.

 

        This all explains why nursing home residents and staff were among the first to receive COVID-19 vaccines when they became available in late December. As a result, nursing home rates of infection with the virus have run below those in the general community for more than two months. Cases there are down more than 90 percent since last fall, but visits remain limited, often just one guest per day per resident.

 

        Lower caseloads do not mean effects of the crisis are over. Many months of near isolation from friends and relatives created other problems for nursing home residents who had been accustomed to seeing visitors regularly.

 

        Advocates of nursing home residents say they need those visits for mental health, to give them a sense of purpose, a reason for going on with life.

 

        Those concerns may have been outweighed at the height of the crisis, but no more.

 

        “The residents, the families, the caregivers have all had enough,” Michael Wasserman, past president of the California Assn. of Long Term Care Medicine, told a reporter. “We’re now approaching the point where, if you’re not vaccinated in a nursing home (and some residents have declined), the primary risk is to yourself (and not to fellow residents).”

 

        Yes, from the earliest days of the pandemic, television showed moving scenes of nursing home residents seeing relatives through ground-floor windows as the only form of visitation open to them.

 

        This was heart-rending, if not as damaging as the fact terminal Covid patients were not allowed even deathbed visitors in hospitals, and were forced to say farewell to their families via cellphone – where that service was available.

 

        Even now, nursing home management is not agitating or lobbying government for an end to the extreme limits on visitation. This may be because pre-pandemic visitors were the main check on those owners, with relatives and other guests often noticing patients who were dehydrated, soiled bedding and other problems the residents themselves may have felt too weak or dependent to protest. The relationship between nursing home operators and visitors has long been uneasy.

  

        So long as Covid ran rampant among their residents, the operators were relieved of all this.

 

        That’s over, thanks to mass vaccination efforts, often led by drugstore chain employees who carried syringes into the homes.

 

        So it’s high time state authorities ordered an end to the pandemic rules. Perhaps a transition, with visitation at levels somewhere below unlimited, is appropriate until the nursing home toll has been lowered even further.

 

        But progress in cutting back incidence of this plague has at least been sufficient to end the companion plague of isolation that preyed on residents’ mental and emotional health at the very time the virus hit them physically.

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    Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough, The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It" is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net

MANSON MEMORY MUST LIVE IN MINDS OF GOVERNORS

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, MAY 4, 2018 OR THEREAFTER


BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

   “MANSON MEMORY MUST LIVE IN MINDS OF GOVERNORS”

          “Never again” is a common slogan popping up appropriately during Holocaust remembrance observances and after repeated fatal shootings in schools or whenever survivors want to comfort each other with the thought their efforts can deter future tragedies.

          But “never forget” might be a more effective motto, where one generation succeeds another in places of high authority and responsibility.

          In fact, “never forget” would be a very appropriate mantra for whoever becomes the next governor of California when it comes to surviving members of the Charles Manson gang and other especially cruel and deliberate mass murderers.

          Forgetting is definitely possible with the Manson “Family,” as his motley and deadly gaggle of followers was known during its heyday in the late 1960s.

          Very few grieved when the sometimes mesmerizing gang leader Manson died in prison last November and not much of a crowd turned out for his funeral this spring in Porterville.

          Manson, understated the pastor presiding over that ceremony, “made choices that brought great consequence and negatively impacted other people for many, many years.”

          The first to be “impacted” were some of the men who hung out with the “Family” during the months the group squatted on the now-defunct Spahn Movie Ranch in the northwest Los Angeles suburb of Chatsworth. One was musician Gary Hinman, whose ear Manson slashed off with a sword before his henchmen killed Hinman. Another was movie stuntman Donald (Shorty) Shea, whose body was found in pieces on the ranch.

          Then, in their more notorious murder spree, Manson’s followers on his orders invaded the Beverly Hills-area home of actress Sharon Tate, brutally killing her along with coffee heiress Abilgail Folger, movie director Voytek Frykowski, hairdresser Jay Sebring and Steven Parent, a friend of the estate’s caretaker. A day later, in the Los Feliz neighborhood a few miles east, they stabbed to death grocer Leno LaBianca and his wife Rosemary, leaving behind messages scrawled in the blood of the victims.

          Yes, as the preacher said, Manson’s choices surely impacted the lives of all those people. He took however many years they all might have had left, costing at least a century’s worth of human experience, not to mention potential offspring and the friends and families affected by their deaths.

          The roster of infamous Manson Family killers still in prison includes Leslie Van Houten, Bruce Davis and Charles (Tex) Watson, all of whom come up for parole periodically. State parole officials occasionally recommend freedom for them on grounds of good behavior and achievements while imprisoned. But can anything they do ever outweigh the harm they did almost 50 years ago?

          Brown, who lived in the Laurel Canyon section of Los Angeles at the time and experienced some of the horror that infused the area while the gang was on the loose, has vetoed their paroles repeatedly.

          Similarly, he would not be likely to succumb to any temptation to release other killers like Juan Corona, who killed 25 farm workers before his skein ended; or Edmund Kemper, the Santa Cruz area’s “Coed Killer” during the 1970s, or Lawrence Bittaker and Roy Norris, who raped, kidnapped, tortured and murdered five young women in 1979 in Southern California. But Brown leaves office at year’s end.

          What about his potential successors, folks like Democrat Gavin Newsom, a child at the time of the Manson slaughters, or Republican John Cox, who moved to California in 2011, long after these crimes?

          For them, the “never forget” mantra is crucial.

          That’s because, while most elderly convicts pose little risk on parole, putting this kind of criminal on the streets would justifiably cause many to look over their shoulders while walking down streets or even sitting at home.

          If Manson’s death and funeral do nothing else, they should renew the sense of horror at the crimes he instigated and committed and add pressure to keep his remaining followers and others like them where they can do no more harm.

          Any future governor who does forget that these folks long ago forfeited their right to liberty and the pursuit of happiness will deserve whatever political consequences might follow.

         

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    Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net.

WILL GAS PRICES STUNT THE CALIFORNIA RECOVERY?

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, MAY 4, 2012, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

          “WILL GAS PRICES STUNT THE CALIFORNIA RECOVERY?”

          The ripple effects of high gasoline prices have been clear for decades, ever since the Arab oil boycott of the mid-1970s temporarily forced a form of gas rationing on California.

          These effects include more riders on public transit, less car vacations, fewer people visiting state and national parks and other outlying attractions, more sales of hybrid and electric cars and much more.

          But now comes a UC Berkeley study supplying reasons why this spring’s dramatic spike in gasoline prices could slow or even reverse the very tenuous California economic recovery that has been ongoing for the last seven months or so.

          Not that the economists who wrote the study, financed in part by the university’s Center for Energy and Environmental Economics, are making any predictions. Rather, their study covers the housing collapse of 2007 and the subsequent, ongoing wave of foreclosures, laying a large part of the blame on the doubling of gas prices between 2005 and 2008, when they peaked at $4.15 per gallon, with then-President George W. Bush unable or unwilling to do much about it.

          The study’s authors, Berkeley’s Steven Sexton and David Zilberman and JunJie Wu of Oregon State University, contend that “low energy prices during the housing boom…made suburban houses affordable to a new class of homeowners characterized by low incomes, high leverage, low credit worthiness and long work commutes.”

          That description is a close fit for many thousands of homeowners who bought during the housing boom in the Inland Empire portions of Southern California and in Central Valley counties like Merced, Madera, Stanislaus and San Joaquin, where many new homeowners of that period commuted regularly to jobs in the East Bay and Silicon Valley suburbs of San Francisco.

          The study does not dismiss financial chicanery, loan fraud and easy money as other causes of the Great Recession. “Lax lending practices and new mortgage products” are two major factors cited by the authors and many others.

          But no one else has fingered gasoline prices, which remained at a fairly constant $1.50 per gallon in 1976 dollars from the late 1970s into the mid-2000s.

          When gasoline spiked, the study contends, “the calculus of suburban living changed. High commute costs made typical homes less valuable and mortgages less affordable for homeowners with …(low) average incomes. Some households could no longer meet mortgage obligations and others walked away from mortgage debt.” In short, high gas prices became the last straw for many.

          No one knows the precise number of “under water” homeowners – their houses worth less than what they owed on their home loans – who were finally moved to action by high gasoline prices. What is known is that there was an increase in apartment rentals in urban centers as the foreclosure trend rose. This suggests many who walked away from under-water homes deliberately sought shorter commutes.

          There’s good news and bad news in all this for today’s California. Ironically, the fact that the housing market has not recovered much from the depths of 2008-10 makes the state relatively immune to some effects of this spring’s gas price spike, which has gone even higher than the damaging increases of 2008. So while all the other ripple effects seen in previous gas price spikes are likely to be repeated, at least there’s not likely to be much of a housing effect.

          Except for one aspect: The higher the price of gasoline goes, the more real estate prices near urban job centers could rise. For the trend when gasoline rises is for more and more people to seek short commutes.

          This, the study authors contend, “explains the disproportionate decline in suburban housing markets” during times like these.

          And for sure, as the authors note, “Those who reside in communities characterized by relatively high gas consumption (read faraway suburbs and ex-urban developments) suffer most” when gas prices rise. They also found that “as gas prices double, (housing) density also doubles.”

          All of which means this spring’s fast upward movement in gas prices will hurt, but should still not produce times as disastrous as those that accompanied the last previous upward move.

          -30-
       Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net

PG&E SPENDING BIG TO KEEP MONOPOLY

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, MAY 4, 2010, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
“PG&E SPENDING BIG TO KEEP MONOPOLY”

Pacific Gas & Electric Co., the giant Northern California utility company, is about to test one of the central axioms of initiative politics. It goes like this: You can defeat almost any ballot proposition by spending really big money against it, because people are generally inclined to vote “no” when they are confused, but it’s much harder to pass a proposition no matter how much you spend.

Make no mistake, PG&E will spend whatever it thinks it will take to pass the innocuous-looking Proposition 16, a June ballot initiative that would require a two-thirds majority of local voters before any local government could set up a publicly-run utility to sell electricity.

For PG&E feels threatened these days, even under siege. There’s a move for San Francisco, the company’s home town, to declare itself electrically independent. There’s a similar possibility in Marin County, just north of San Francisco. The South San Joaquin Irrigation District would like to provide power for Manteca and other cities. Altogether, such moves are afoot in more than 40 locales around California.

Essentially, these areas appear en route to setting up arrangements called community choice aggregations (CCAs), where cities and districts buy power from generators and sell it to local residents at prices of their choosing, transmitting the energy they obtain over the power grid owned and operated by big utilities like PG&E, Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric.

Plainly, PG&E does not want to become something akin to a common carrier that mainly supplies transportation, but if that gradually happens, it would largely be the big utility’s own doing.

For PG&E was a prime backer of the disastrous state deregulation plan adopted in the late 1990s with approval from then-Gov. Pete Wilson. That plan saw PG&E and other utilities sell off many of their most significant power plants to the generating companies that now can sell to CCAs at negotiated prices.

CCAs also are a means of encouraging more “green” power than traditional utilities now provide, with some cities wanting to set up new solar arrays, biofuel facilities, wind farms and more.

All it takes now for a CCA to go forward is a few votes by city councils and district boards. That’s not enough of a barrier to suit PG&E. So it spent $3.5 million to qualify Proposition 16 for the ballot, put another $18.5 million into its effort in the three months after the measure was certified and will spend more than $35 million before primary Election Day in June. Giving some idea of how little appeal this measure has to others: PG&E as of April 15 was the sole funder of Proposition 16.

Presenting itself as a benevolent giant, PG&E has already used a spate of colorful mailers to call the proposition a matter of fairness. “We believe our customers should have a say in determining whether or not their local government spends public money to take on the risks of the power business,” says company spokesman Andrew Souvall. “We want to give people more control over how their tax dollars are spent.”

But the initiative worries even well-established public utilities. Palo Alto, for one, worries it might not be able to seek new power sources without laborious public votes that would require two-thirds majorities that are always difficult to obtain. In Lodi, where the publicly-owned utility is a century old, city officials worry they won’t be able to serve newly annexed areas.

Council members from more than a dozen cities label the measure “an attempt by PG&E to create a monopoly.”

As for giving taxpayers more say, they warn that if this passes, a simple majority of voters would set perpetual two-thirds-vote requirements for all future attempts to establish public power agencies.

City officials may be vocal in opposing the measure, but they can’t spend any taxpayer dollars against it, while PG&E has no limits on its spending under both federal and state law.

It’s one of two self-serving propositions this spring, each placed on the ballot by companies that stand to benefit most from them. The other is Proposition 17, sponsored by Mercury Insurance, allowing insurance companies to charge more for auto insurance bought by drivers who have not had continuous coverage up until the time they buy a new policy.

In both cases, the companies are testing that old axiom about yes votes being hard to come by, trying to pass propositions while outspending their opponents by factors of 1,000-1 or more.

If they succeed, they will surely provide fodder for the many critics of the initiative process who say it should be altered to reduce or eliminate the influence of big money on public policy.

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Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net