Iowa's nursing home residents deserve better from state lawmakers

Yahoo

09-04-2025

Cropped shot of a senior man at home (Photo via Getty Images)
The late newspaper columnist Bill Wundram of the Quad-City Times in Davenport wrote seven days a week for 31 years. Many of his columns, highlighting a wide variety of concerns in his home community, included the refrain, 'Is anybody there? Does anybody care?'
That plaintive question came to mind Tuesday as I listened to Iowa senators debate what is likely to be the lone bill this year addressing nursing home regulation. Actually, 'debate' is the wrong word. What happened was a refusal to debate.
Democrats introduced 14 bills this session in an effort to address critical failures in Iowa's nursing homes. Failures like the one Iowa Capital Dispatch's Clark Kauffman reported Tuesday that led to what must have been agonizing pain, weeks of suffering and the eventual death of a resident at Sanford Senior Care in Sheldon.
State inspectors reported that in January, the resident had developed a 'reddened area' on his coccyx, or tailbone. Nursing home staff did nothing, state records show – no assessment, treatment or physician contact – even after the sore developed into an open wound in February.
The man 'looked absolutely awful,' an aide told inspectors later. 'There was bloody skin on both sides of the buttocks and continuing down it looked like hamburger,' the aide said, according to inspectors' reports.
In March, the man was finally taken to the hospital with a Stage 4 wound that exposed muscle, bone or tendons. He died two days later of a staph infection.
Is anybody there? Does anybody care?
As anyone who reads Iowa Capital Dispatch regularly already knows, stories like this happen with shocking regularity. Senate Minority Leader Janice Weiner brought up several of them Tuesday on the Senate floor:
A resident at a care facility in Keota died from complications resulting from a fall after being found lying with bleeding head wound but not being transferred to a hospital until 15 days later.
In Wellman, where a nursing home worker found a woman lying on the floor with a 'big goose egg' on the side of her head but was put to bed instead of being provided medical assistance. She was admitted to the hospital the next day and diagnosed with a brain bleed, fractured clavicle and urinary tract infection. She died a few weeks later of her injuries.
In Story City, a nursing home was cited for inadequate staffing twice in a month. The second time was after a resident known to need supervision while eating choked to death on a caramel brownie.
Not enough examples for you? Here are some others.
Nursing home sued after resident falls down concrete stairs in wheelchair
Resident chokes to death, home cited for rodents and staffing issues
Iowa care facilities recently cited for death, abuse and neglect
Nurse faces sentencing for wanton neglect in death of nursing home resident
Woman dies at Iowa nursing home recently acquired by private equity firm
Burns, 'grapefruit-size' wound and death trigger nursing home lawsuit
Care facility fined $9,000 for infection, death
Is anybody there? Does anybody care?
The bills introduced by Sen. Claire Celsi, D-West Moines, would have required more frequent inspections of nursing homes and added 30 new inspectors to do the work. They would have increased fines for violations and allowed family members to install cameras in their loved ones' rooms to help them monitor care. They would have prevented predatory private equity firms from buying out nursing home chains — a situation that has degraded care in Iowa facilities.
None of the bills received a hearing before a committee deadline, making all of them ineligible for debate in their original form.
That left Democrats to try to attach some of the proposals as amendments to the only nursing home bill the majority party has been inclined to consider. That bill would give nursing home operators an extra opportunity to avoid being cited for critical violations.
All of the amendments that would have expanded oversight were ruled out of order on Tuesday. The majority party senators could have chosen to debate these measures anyway. They did not.
Is anybody there? Does anybody care?
One might wonder what other issues the GOP majority in the Legislature finds more compelling than the safety of our elderly loved ones.
As an example, here's what was happening in Des Moines while a man was dying in Sheldon:
On March 6, the same day the patient in Sheldon was admitted to the hospital after weeks of neglect, the Republican majority in the Statehouse was pushing its priority bills through the first of two deadlines for committee action. What were those priorities?
Well, they kept alive a bill to make sure 18-year-olds can carry a firearm, because that will make the rest of us feel a whole lot safer. They pushed forward election changes that will mean any Iowan with a foreign-sounding name or brown skin will want to carry their passport if they want to vote without a whole lot of red tape. And they backed the badge by passing a law to allow Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird to target a county sheriff who said in social media that he wasn't going to comply with detainer requests from federal immigration enforcement unless they were 'valid' ones.
What they weren't doing is lifting a finger to make our elderly loved ones safer in long-term care.
There's at least one more opportunity this year for lawmakers to do something meaningful for nursing home residents. They could include some of the Democrats' oversight proposals and funding for additional inspectors in the state budget.
Sen. Kara Warme, R-Ames, said Tuesday she was 'sympathetic' to the concerns raised by the Democrats – as she was seeking to have their proposals dismissed.
'I'm sympathetic to the concerns raised by the senators, and I believe resident safety is a top priority in our nursing facilities,' she said.
Iowa has a lot of excellent nursing homes with caring staff, to be sure. But turning a blind eye to the abuse, neglect and literal torture that residents are enduring in some facilities is the opposite of sympathy.
Is anyone there? Does anyone care?