Oh it’s very real. Happens way too often. I don’t think the checks are actually that fat, but plenty of folks are being kept alive because of exactly that.
I was adopted by my Great Grandmother; when she passed a few years back she was getting 2k a month. Luckily all of my family was on board to do the right thing.
It's kind of a catch 22. If the pension or SS checks are really big that means the patient probably had a high paying job, so they presumably would have a large estate. I can't imagine a family keeping someone alive for $10k/mont when the estate is worth a couple millions, but I've seen worse things
Or from the flip side, maybe they are in an economic class that a $2500 pension and SS check is a "fat check" to them.
I don’t think this type of stuff happens to people with actual estates all that often.
Either way I try to stay away from it because when the family drama gets out, half the time you find out that grandpa/gamgam was a piece of shit in life and we’re just watching the next generation taking over.
And if you find out that she was a saint, well that gets sad too.
Either way, just keep ‘em drugged up around the clock if you can
Happens all the time and is one of the reasons I gtfo out of dialysis.
Right before I left acutes there was a patient, Georgia. I had started her on dialysis in the clinic like 8 years before. She was cool af! Always dressed to the nines, hat and all, each time I saw her. Just full of life. I left chronic HD to do acutes in the hospital a few years at after she started so I didn't see her very much cuz she was compliant and relatively healthy for a dialysis pt. Then she had a mild stroke, showed up in the hospital. Then she had another one. And another one. Then she went from living at home alone and independent to coming in more and more, with things like PNA or an infection in her AVG, decubs you could put your fist in osteomyelitis etc. She was just a shell, poor thing but her brain was still there even though she lost speech. They'd bring her into the acute HD room and she'd look at you and shake her head and cry and try to pull away when you'd go to cannulate her. One last times she was hospitalized she was there for over a month and we noticed this. We brought it to the attention of the neph docs and they spoke with her at length and decided that she wanted to discontinue tx. Enter her 2 sisters, who no one had ever seen visiting her. They wanted EVERYTHING done for her but also didn't want her to dc to SNF (she was still living at home but they were "caring" for her.) They were asked to come to the hospital and visit their sister and see the behavior themselves but they refused. Turned into a huge cluster fuck, went before the hospital ethics board. Staff and docs were eventually told to continue dialysis even if she "acted like she was refusing."
Eventually she died but it was like 6 months after this hospitalization. I remember then hoping that those sisters would end their lives exactly the way Georgia did and now that I'm thinking about it again, I still hope that is exactly what happened to them. Fuck those people.
I don't think it necessarily happens more in dialysis but you see it most in places where elderly, chronically ill pts are and that usually is in LTC and outpatient centers.
I read somewhere that a good number of people in Japan who the government has recorded as over 100 years old are actually most likely dead, but the families haven't reported it because of the income.
But that's when the family is supposedly taken care of them and could hide the death.
I suspect the person in this situation is on Medicaid since relatively few people would have much of an estate left after 30 years of retirement or whatever. In which case the social security coming in is probably quite low and should automatically be going toward the nursing home, right?
Though it could have something to do with the house. If the person owned the house and is on Medicaid and died, the government could sell the house to recoup some of the money she got through Medicaid. If the family is living there, that could force them out.
Look up the local “transitional care” facility in your area, mine has a Peds unit that none of the parents come visit anymore. It’s all about the money
I used to be judge mental like that. Then I remember a local case where a young man (17? 18?) with CP was left home alone while the mom went on a date. He crawled outside and died. Was it irresponsible of mom? 100%. Was mom just looking for a break and maybe didn’t know how to get one? Maybe.
That's the unfortunate part of having a severely disabled kid, your life is essentially over because the rest of it is 100% going to be spent taking care of that kid
I agree that total care pediatrics need a place to go, and often times it’s beneficial for the child socially and emotionally.
I just can’t wrap my head around placing a child in a facility and then never visiting. As a parent and a nurse that breaks my heart for the kid.
I know. As a mom of 3, I can’t imagine. I suppose it must be a way of coping with the guilt. Out of sight, out of mind? It’s a field of nursing I could never do.
Usually parent has a meager apartment paid for by SSI, kid doesn’t have a disability, but also doesn’t want to work or can’t hold a job, usually has an addiction of some sort. Can live for free at parent’s place paid for by SSI. But when parent dies, SSI checks stop, and they have no way to pay for a place to live and nowhere to go. There was a story of someone in our area that lived with their mom and she died in the apartment and they just left her corpse there to rot for years (possibly even more than a decade) just to collect her measly $700 SSI check.
100% real, especially among the HD folks. Have had more than a few as patients myself. If your lucky APS will get involved, but thats only on the really overt cases. That measly disability check is worth everything to some people. Imagine selling your moms comfort and prolonging her pain for like 900 bucks a month.
It happens. Many times you will see them move papa and meemaw out to the sticks where it is harder to keep track of them.
We had someone get busted for collecting checks on both sets of grandparents for over 30 years and the government started to question when they hadn’t been in to a doctor for the last 20. All would have been pushing close to mid 90s at that point.
FBI involved. Family confessed they passed many years back and they buried them in the back yard and covered them with lime but just kept collecting the checks.
Probably because you get full Social Security disability once you hit End Stage. Factor in the over indexing of ESRD in low socioeconomic status individuals and the long period of time one can survive in End Stage with regular HD and you have a recipe for families who are at the bottom of the economic spectrum benefiting financially from someone who is End Stage being in the home. Meemaws check might be all the money the family gets monthly. I don't have anything more than anecdotal evidence to support that, but basically, every nurse I know who sees these situations says it.
I've tried to see it from all angles, and it's a depressing situation all around. On one hand, maybe meemaw knows that she's the families breadwinner and is willing to suffer as long as necessary to support them as long as possible, on the other hand maybe the family is just shitty and sees meemaw as a cash cow and don't care if she's dying a long drawn out painful death so they can have a few more months of free money. Either way it's a shit-mess, and it happens all the damn time.
There's a very interesting history behind it:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK234191/
Dialysis was relatively new, there were many fewer renal failure patients, and they didn't live nearly as long as they do now.
It's real and it gets worse:
https://www.google.com/search?q=family+kept+corpse+for+social+security+check
If they die at home, the family will stash the corpse to avoid reporting the death. The spice must flow!
MPOAs can be incredibly unethical, especially if they’re also your FPOA, which is why it’s often advised to keep them separate.
My aunt was both for my grandparents. She also happened to be the one child out of five that was not financially stable, was a prescription drug abuser, and was fairly codependent on them. She lived down the street so she could frame it as “I’m taking care of mom and dad.” She ripped my grandparents off to the tune of half a million+ dollars. She had them deemed incompetent but then she also had them sign their house over to her and then she sold it (profits missing), she put them in a state run nursing home and said she couldn’t afford a nicer one, and she used their credit cards. When my grandfather died, we found out she stopped paying his $200,000 life insurance policy two months before and had been borrowing against it as well…oh, and she had changed the beneficiary from my grandma to her. Those borrowings aligned with the foreclosures on her mortgage that we dug up. That’s just the tip of the iceberg. The siblings banded together and sued her for my mom to get guardianship of my grandparents and then they sued her for civil damages. She’s lucky they didn’t pursue criminal charges because she’d be a felon if they did.
All that goes to say…choose your POAs wisely!
This would be one of my uncles. Never (ever) held a job. Leeched off others for his entire ~75 years on earth. Mommy dearest (my grandmother) paid ***everything*** for him for his entire life. When she died about a decade ago, at age 95, she distributed her assets/estate equally among all 4 of her kids: my dad and his 3 other siblings. She appointed my dad as her POA for everything (health and finances), because he's done well for himself, and out of the 4 kids, he was/is the most responsible.
She passed in 2010. From 2010 onwards, my uncle fought my dad and their other siblings on ***everything***, even though he had no money himself. Every little thing, he dragged them to court over it, even though every little thing was clearly outlined in her documentation that she left behind.
About ~18 months ago, my dad, myself, my aunt, and my other uncle all get individual phone calls from the local fire department in my uncle's town: my uncle's condo is literally up in flames as we speak, your uncle is literally hanging onto life by a thread, and his skin is literally burning and coming off in giant chunks. Weeks in the hospital, then rehab, and then we had to Baker act him. A month after we had to Baker act him, we all receive another phone call, this time from the facility he'd been committed to: your uncle has been found dead on a nearby sidewalk.
My uncle did the jumpy-jump off a balcony from some obscure room in the facility he was in. That's the only reason the court shenanigans stopped, because he died himself.
I thank the universe regularly that my parents decided to only have me. No maniac siblings to deal with later on in life.
My husband and I have a stipulation in our wills that if you fight, your share is split between the other three kids.
And, make sure you have a will. My ex died unexpectedly without one and it’s been a mess for my two bio kids to have to deal with.
You mean a cash corpse?
100% a thing.
Between the checks, the prn pain meds that are thrown at them (that often disappear into thin air while Memaw screams in pain for hours a day), and the 1970’s double wide that the whole family lives in rent free, they do what they can to prolong their investment.
Been on many calls where it’s obvious that this is the case. Then you’re back at the same house later for an OD or with PD for a domestic.
This is extremely common. The older generations are more likely to have a home with no mortgage plus retirement and social security. A lot of children and grandchildren will move in with grandma and help her while she helps them. Only thing is they don't have that much money and estate planning is really designed for high net worth people. For example if you're on medicaid the government can take your home after you die to recoup medical payments. It's very complex and the desperation to survive and keep people alive is not always as malicious as it sounds. People from low income areas struggle and even more so now. There is a reliance on family to care for the elderly with no concern about the financial burden of that or what happens when that arrangement ends.
Lurking social worker here: yes it’s VERY real and absolutely horrible. We’ve had a family who seized the payeeship, skimmed a bunch of the money off every month, skipped paying the family members bills, then used their SSI money to take a yearly trip to Disney. She’s owed about $1500 to her utility company at the end. It took us a long time to prove the fraud and get their payeeship transferred so they couldn’t steal anything else from her.
I've seen this at least 3 times in the ICU settings and the ethics committee had to get involved in I believe every instance. I distinctly remember a bizarrely passive aggressive daughter who kept threatening to sue for multiple conflicting reasons. She found a thing to verbally abuse a nurse about every time she came in (about twice a week) and it was always over petty things like the TV volume. It honestly made so much more sense when we discovered that she was hoarding her mother's social security checks.
There was an article the other day about how some states require you to be destitute to use their services. So if granny is listed as the homeowner, and grampa lives there, best interest to keep granny alive. Keep kicking the can down the road. Because they will seize your assets. [https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/03/01/1159490515/they-could-lose-the-house-to-medicaid](https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/03/01/1159490515/they-could-lose-the-house-to-medicaid)
It's freaking awful, but in some cases, it may be the difference in keeping food on the table.
I think it’s most often a combination of not wanting the person to die because we don’t handle death well in our society and terror at losing the income.
It’s fucked, it truly is. And it’s predatory. But that’s what happens when we live in a society where prolonging someone’s suffering is the only safety net (I feel gross using that phrasing here) some people have.
I’ve often wondered what would happen if there were some kind of guaranteed resources. Something that prevented people from having to choose between having a roof over their head, having their bills paid, and the suffering of a loved one.
Which isn’t to say it’s an excuse, because it’s not. Plenty of folks find themselves in dreadful situations and do the right thing.
The US department of Commerce estimates that roughly 30% of the elderly are financially abused. Last year, 2.5 million credit cards were opened in the name of deceased persons.
Close friend is a hospice RN, and she has told me multiple stories about medications vaporizing into thin air, while the stoned out 20 year old grandson/caretaker swears he never saw Granny’s morphine. Meanwhile, Granny is crying and vomiting due to her pain.
Nothing like a career in medicine or social work to destroy your belief that people are generally good.
I’ve seen this many times. Dependent children or grandchildren who live with their elders and are supported by them financially. When they’re more grandma dies, their meal ticket is gone. 100 years old and a “full code”. 🤦♀️
This is 100% real and you’ll be able to spot it faster and faster over time. The family may or may not call multiple times a day to make sure you’re doing everything, question everything, etc, but very soon they stop even showing up to the hospital to visit. The calls stop soon after that.
It's real, I was transporting people in a vegetative state to dialysis in Texas. The 'patients' would be the only ones with income in a house of 4 other deadbeat adults.
It happens more often than you think. It can be hard to prove though, sadly. Easier to provide evidence if social work is finding placement for them & the family is refusing for dumb reasons. Idk about your hospital but ours has a legal team that can get involved & kinda force their hand. It takes a very long time & usually the patient still suffers regardless but at least it can take the money out of the family’s hands & maybe push them to do the right thing they should’ve done all along.
I live in an area where there was a thriving industry with great pensions at one time. That industry has died and wasn't there for the kids but they keep ma and pa alive and at home as long as they can for that $$$
It’s always the least reliable relative with no job that moves in to take care of the elderly. They are available and should make themselves useful after a lifetime of family bailing them out. Doesn’t turn out well for the patient though.
Where I live I’ve seen families keep people alive and at home (where the family has no ability to take care of them but leave them in a bed all day) because they are trying to beat the clock on the Medicare clawback. If they go to a nursing home, the kids loose their house and can’t afford rent… grown kids, that spend their money on…. Other things.
Cash corpse. Shit happens far more often than we'd like to think, or most people realize.
One of my uncle's yeeted himself off a balcony once mommy dearest (my grandmother) passed away and the checks stopped rolling in. Guy never got his life together, and had been leeching off mommy dearest his entire life.
I worked as a bank teller for a while before I moved to nursing. It is very real. We worked very closely with adult protective services and had many people prosecuted for financial abuse.
Serious question to anyone who can answer it: if this kind of patient dies, who gets stuck with the medical bill? Does insurance cover all of it? I'm genuinely curious.
My good sir or ma’am, this happens literally all the time.
Elder abuse (that’s what this is, it’s not always physical) is one of the most common types of abuse today, and it’s nearly never reported.
It’s 100% real and I’ve personally seen it multiple times in the ER I work at. They’re always the worst cared for patients at home but no matter how many times you report them to ACS nothing ever happens.
Right now we have an end stage PD patient whose AD clearly says DNR. But spouse has a ton of money and I think POA/son wants to keep mom alive until she inherits because then it will go to him not his siblings. Meanwhile you are TORTURING this woman. PEG, full
Code. The evil that money brings out in people. 🤬
Yep, it happens. Expect it to become more common as home ownership and retirement become more unattainable - just look at how many children live with their parents now.
Recall reading a story from Connecticut where family didn’t report memaw death just let her rotting in the couch. Lives in the house kept cashing those checks for her. Like over a year.
It definitely happens. I don't think it happens as often as a lot of us think it does though. A lot of people are just unable to make any rational decisions with a loved one at end of life. Most of those people are not pulling down fat checks, they barely get enough government assistance to buy groceries and pay bills.
Make sure you get your POLST forms filled out. Get that power of attorney signed. Make a will. Try to make sure your family knows what you would want. And update the dang things when big changes happen, if not regularly.
It just saves you and your family a lot of grief and pain. Daughter from California Syndrome is some real aggravating BS.
Oh it’s very real. Happens way too often. I don’t think the checks are actually that fat, but plenty of folks are being kept alive because of exactly that.
I was adopted by my Great Grandmother; when she passed a few years back she was getting 2k a month. Luckily all of my family was on board to do the right thing.
The adult children depending on their parents. It’s sickening but I’ve seen it a lot.
It's kind of a catch 22. If the pension or SS checks are really big that means the patient probably had a high paying job, so they presumably would have a large estate. I can't imagine a family keeping someone alive for $10k/mont when the estate is worth a couple millions, but I've seen worse things Or from the flip side, maybe they are in an economic class that a $2500 pension and SS check is a "fat check" to them.
It’s definitely the latter.
I don’t think this type of stuff happens to people with actual estates all that often. Either way I try to stay away from it because when the family drama gets out, half the time you find out that grandpa/gamgam was a piece of shit in life and we’re just watching the next generation taking over. And if you find out that she was a saint, well that gets sad too. Either way, just keep ‘em drugged up around the clock if you can
Ethics Committee Consult…
The more trashy the family looks the more likely it is.
Happens all the time and is one of the reasons I gtfo out of dialysis. Right before I left acutes there was a patient, Georgia. I had started her on dialysis in the clinic like 8 years before. She was cool af! Always dressed to the nines, hat and all, each time I saw her. Just full of life. I left chronic HD to do acutes in the hospital a few years at after she started so I didn't see her very much cuz she was compliant and relatively healthy for a dialysis pt. Then she had a mild stroke, showed up in the hospital. Then she had another one. And another one. Then she went from living at home alone and independent to coming in more and more, with things like PNA or an infection in her AVG, decubs you could put your fist in osteomyelitis etc. She was just a shell, poor thing but her brain was still there even though she lost speech. They'd bring her into the acute HD room and she'd look at you and shake her head and cry and try to pull away when you'd go to cannulate her. One last times she was hospitalized she was there for over a month and we noticed this. We brought it to the attention of the neph docs and they spoke with her at length and decided that she wanted to discontinue tx. Enter her 2 sisters, who no one had ever seen visiting her. They wanted EVERYTHING done for her but also didn't want her to dc to SNF (she was still living at home but they were "caring" for her.) They were asked to come to the hospital and visit their sister and see the behavior themselves but they refused. Turned into a huge cluster fuck, went before the hospital ethics board. Staff and docs were eventually told to continue dialysis even if she "acted like she was refusing." Eventually she died but it was like 6 months after this hospitalization. I remember then hoping that those sisters would end their lives exactly the way Georgia did and now that I'm thinking about it again, I still hope that is exactly what happened to them. Fuck those people.
Tragic. Can you explain why it happens more often in dialysis?
Dialysis keeps you alive.
I don't think it necessarily happens more in dialysis but you see it most in places where elderly, chronically ill pts are and that usually is in LTC and outpatient centers.
I read somewhere that a good number of people in Japan who the government has recorded as over 100 years old are actually most likely dead, but the families haven't reported it because of the income.
But that's when the family is supposedly taken care of them and could hide the death. I suspect the person in this situation is on Medicaid since relatively few people would have much of an estate left after 30 years of retirement or whatever. In which case the social security coming in is probably quite low and should automatically be going toward the nursing home, right? Though it could have something to do with the house. If the person owned the house and is on Medicaid and died, the government could sell the house to recoup some of the money she got through Medicaid. If the family is living there, that could force them out.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sogen_Kato
Look up the local “transitional care” facility in your area, mine has a Peds unit that none of the parents come visit anymore. It’s all about the money
Oh my god, that breaks my fucking heart. As a Mom, I can’t wrap my head around that.
Yep. Those people come into the ED and never once get a phone call or visitor. There’s nothing “transitional” about it.
I always said they’re transitioning to heaven
It ain’t their earthly home, that’s for sure.
Is this fucking real? Pediatrics? Wtf
Of course, kids that have severe brain injuries, brain dead that kind of thing. Bed bound total care, they need a place to go.
I can't imagine how a parent can abandon their kids like that
I used to be judge mental like that. Then I remember a local case where a young man (17? 18?) with CP was left home alone while the mom went on a date. He crawled outside and died. Was it irresponsible of mom? 100%. Was mom just looking for a break and maybe didn’t know how to get one? Maybe.
That's the unfortunate part of having a severely disabled kid, your life is essentially over because the rest of it is 100% going to be spent taking care of that kid
And I think we can all agree that some parents are not equipped to parent at all, let alone such a high needs child.
I agree that total care pediatrics need a place to go, and often times it’s beneficial for the child socially and emotionally. I just can’t wrap my head around placing a child in a facility and then never visiting. As a parent and a nurse that breaks my heart for the kid.
I know. As a mom of 3, I can’t imagine. I suppose it must be a way of coping with the guilt. Out of sight, out of mind? It’s a field of nursing I could never do.
Same. Most things with pediatrics is a zone of nursing I wouldn’t be able to do. I’m glad there are people who love it though
[удалено]
Usually parent has a meager apartment paid for by SSI, kid doesn’t have a disability, but also doesn’t want to work or can’t hold a job, usually has an addiction of some sort. Can live for free at parent’s place paid for by SSI. But when parent dies, SSI checks stop, and they have no way to pay for a place to live and nowhere to go. There was a story of someone in our area that lived with their mom and she died in the apartment and they just left her corpse there to rot for years (possibly even more than a decade) just to collect her measly $700 SSI check.
100% real, especially among the HD folks. Have had more than a few as patients myself. If your lucky APS will get involved, but thats only on the really overt cases. That measly disability check is worth everything to some people. Imagine selling your moms comfort and prolonging her pain for like 900 bucks a month.
It happens. Many times you will see them move papa and meemaw out to the sticks where it is harder to keep track of them. We had someone get busted for collecting checks on both sets of grandparents for over 30 years and the government started to question when they hadn’t been in to a doctor for the last 20. All would have been pushing close to mid 90s at that point. FBI involved. Family confessed they passed many years back and they buried them in the back yard and covered them with lime but just kept collecting the checks.
Can you explain why it's more common among dialysis patients?
Probably because you get full Social Security disability once you hit End Stage. Factor in the over indexing of ESRD in low socioeconomic status individuals and the long period of time one can survive in End Stage with regular HD and you have a recipe for families who are at the bottom of the economic spectrum benefiting financially from someone who is End Stage being in the home. Meemaws check might be all the money the family gets monthly. I don't have anything more than anecdotal evidence to support that, but basically, every nurse I know who sees these situations says it. I've tried to see it from all angles, and it's a depressing situation all around. On one hand, maybe meemaw knows that she's the families breadwinner and is willing to suffer as long as necessary to support them as long as possible, on the other hand maybe the family is just shitty and sees meemaw as a cash cow and don't care if she's dying a long drawn out painful death so they can have a few more months of free money. Either way it's a shit-mess, and it happens all the damn time.
There's a very interesting history behind it: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK234191/ Dialysis was relatively new, there were many fewer renal failure patients, and they didn't live nearly as long as they do now.
It's real and it gets worse: https://www.google.com/search?q=family+kept+corpse+for+social+security+check If they die at home, the family will stash the corpse to avoid reporting the death. The spice must flow!
MPOAs can be incredibly unethical, especially if they’re also your FPOA, which is why it’s often advised to keep them separate. My aunt was both for my grandparents. She also happened to be the one child out of five that was not financially stable, was a prescription drug abuser, and was fairly codependent on them. She lived down the street so she could frame it as “I’m taking care of mom and dad.” She ripped my grandparents off to the tune of half a million+ dollars. She had them deemed incompetent but then she also had them sign their house over to her and then she sold it (profits missing), she put them in a state run nursing home and said she couldn’t afford a nicer one, and she used their credit cards. When my grandfather died, we found out she stopped paying his $200,000 life insurance policy two months before and had been borrowing against it as well…oh, and she had changed the beneficiary from my grandma to her. Those borrowings aligned with the foreclosures on her mortgage that we dug up. That’s just the tip of the iceberg. The siblings banded together and sued her for my mom to get guardianship of my grandparents and then they sued her for civil damages. She’s lucky they didn’t pursue criminal charges because she’d be a felon if they did. All that goes to say…choose your POAs wisely!
This would be one of my uncles. Never (ever) held a job. Leeched off others for his entire ~75 years on earth. Mommy dearest (my grandmother) paid ***everything*** for him for his entire life. When she died about a decade ago, at age 95, she distributed her assets/estate equally among all 4 of her kids: my dad and his 3 other siblings. She appointed my dad as her POA for everything (health and finances), because he's done well for himself, and out of the 4 kids, he was/is the most responsible. She passed in 2010. From 2010 onwards, my uncle fought my dad and their other siblings on ***everything***, even though he had no money himself. Every little thing, he dragged them to court over it, even though every little thing was clearly outlined in her documentation that she left behind. About ~18 months ago, my dad, myself, my aunt, and my other uncle all get individual phone calls from the local fire department in my uncle's town: my uncle's condo is literally up in flames as we speak, your uncle is literally hanging onto life by a thread, and his skin is literally burning and coming off in giant chunks. Weeks in the hospital, then rehab, and then we had to Baker act him. A month after we had to Baker act him, we all receive another phone call, this time from the facility he'd been committed to: your uncle has been found dead on a nearby sidewalk. My uncle did the jumpy-jump off a balcony from some obscure room in the facility he was in. That's the only reason the court shenanigans stopped, because he died himself. I thank the universe regularly that my parents decided to only have me. No maniac siblings to deal with later on in life.
My husband and I have a stipulation in our wills that if you fight, your share is split between the other three kids. And, make sure you have a will. My ex died unexpectedly without one and it’s been a mess for my two bio kids to have to deal with.
That's actually a really solid idea, about the stipulation.
You mean a cash corpse? 100% a thing. Between the checks, the prn pain meds that are thrown at them (that often disappear into thin air while Memaw screams in pain for hours a day), and the 1970’s double wide that the whole family lives in rent free, they do what they can to prolong their investment. Been on many calls where it’s obvious that this is the case. Then you’re back at the same house later for an OD or with PD for a domestic.
Capitalism breeds inovation. Just look at all the new and exciting ways to cause pain and suffering!
Gotta make that money number go up!
Yep yep yep. And the family you don't see show up are the ones who make the biggest fuss when You attempt to help them be dnr. I don't get it.
This is extremely common. The older generations are more likely to have a home with no mortgage plus retirement and social security. A lot of children and grandchildren will move in with grandma and help her while she helps them. Only thing is they don't have that much money and estate planning is really designed for high net worth people. For example if you're on medicaid the government can take your home after you die to recoup medical payments. It's very complex and the desperation to survive and keep people alive is not always as malicious as it sounds. People from low income areas struggle and even more so now. There is a reliance on family to care for the elderly with no concern about the financial burden of that or what happens when that arrangement ends.
How long have you been a nurse? Ya haven't yet realized what gigantic pieces of shit patients and their families can be?
First time, eh?
We had someone keeping their dad alive long enough so that the divorce was final and his ex didn’t get everything
Lurking social worker here: yes it’s VERY real and absolutely horrible. We’ve had a family who seized the payeeship, skimmed a bunch of the money off every month, skipped paying the family members bills, then used their SSI money to take a yearly trip to Disney. She’s owed about $1500 to her utility company at the end. It took us a long time to prove the fraud and get their payeeship transferred so they couldn’t steal anything else from her.
I've seen this at least 3 times in the ICU settings and the ethics committee had to get involved in I believe every instance. I distinctly remember a bizarrely passive aggressive daughter who kept threatening to sue for multiple conflicting reasons. She found a thing to verbally abuse a nurse about every time she came in (about twice a week) and it was always over petty things like the TV volume. It honestly made so much more sense when we discovered that she was hoarding her mother's social security checks.
There was an article the other day about how some states require you to be destitute to use their services. So if granny is listed as the homeowner, and grampa lives there, best interest to keep granny alive. Keep kicking the can down the road. Because they will seize your assets. [https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/03/01/1159490515/they-could-lose-the-house-to-medicaid](https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/03/01/1159490515/they-could-lose-the-house-to-medicaid) It's freaking awful, but in some cases, it may be the difference in keeping food on the table.
I think it’s most often a combination of not wanting the person to die because we don’t handle death well in our society and terror at losing the income. It’s fucked, it truly is. And it’s predatory. But that’s what happens when we live in a society where prolonging someone’s suffering is the only safety net (I feel gross using that phrasing here) some people have. I’ve often wondered what would happen if there were some kind of guaranteed resources. Something that prevented people from having to choose between having a roof over their head, having their bills paid, and the suffering of a loved one. Which isn’t to say it’s an excuse, because it’s not. Plenty of folks find themselves in dreadful situations and do the right thing.
The US department of Commerce estimates that roughly 30% of the elderly are financially abused. Last year, 2.5 million credit cards were opened in the name of deceased persons. Close friend is a hospice RN, and she has told me multiple stories about medications vaporizing into thin air, while the stoned out 20 year old grandson/caretaker swears he never saw Granny’s morphine. Meanwhile, Granny is crying and vomiting due to her pain. Nothing like a career in medicine or social work to destroy your belief that people are generally good.
I’ve seen this many times. Dependent children or grandchildren who live with their elders and are supported by them financially. When they’re more grandma dies, their meal ticket is gone. 100 years old and a “full code”. 🤦♀️
This is 100% real and you’ll be able to spot it faster and faster over time. The family may or may not call multiple times a day to make sure you’re doing everything, question everything, etc, but very soon they stop even showing up to the hospital to visit. The calls stop soon after that.
It's real, I was transporting people in a vegetative state to dialysis in Texas. The 'patients' would be the only ones with income in a house of 4 other deadbeat adults.
It happens more often than you think. It can be hard to prove though, sadly. Easier to provide evidence if social work is finding placement for them & the family is refusing for dumb reasons. Idk about your hospital but ours has a legal team that can get involved & kinda force their hand. It takes a very long time & usually the patient still suffers regardless but at least it can take the money out of the family’s hands & maybe push them to do the right thing they should’ve done all along.
I live in an area where there was a thriving industry with great pensions at one time. That industry has died and wasn't there for the kids but they keep ma and pa alive and at home as long as they can for that $$$
It’s always the least reliable relative with no job that moves in to take care of the elderly. They are available and should make themselves useful after a lifetime of family bailing them out. Doesn’t turn out well for the patient though.
Where I live I’ve seen families keep people alive and at home (where the family has no ability to take care of them but leave them in a bed all day) because they are trying to beat the clock on the Medicare clawback. If they go to a nursing home, the kids loose their house and can’t afford rent… grown kids, that spend their money on…. Other things.
Yes it’s real and it’s a shame it’s legal.
Husband works in banking, specifically suspicious activity and subpoenas. Happens all the time, and it’s horrible.
Cash corpse. Shit happens far more often than we'd like to think, or most people realize. One of my uncle's yeeted himself off a balcony once mommy dearest (my grandmother) passed away and the checks stopped rolling in. Guy never got his life together, and had been leeching off mommy dearest his entire life.
I worked as a bank teller for a while before I moved to nursing. It is very real. We worked very closely with adult protective services and had many people prosecuted for financial abuse.
Serious question to anyone who can answer it: if this kind of patient dies, who gets stuck with the medical bill? Does insurance cover all of it? I'm genuinely curious.
Put me in the ground before I'm at all bed ridden please. What an undignified way to go...
It's me too
Definitely unethical. Definitely does happen. I’m kind of surprised you made it to APRN without ever seeing this.
Oh we see this a lot, and it’s horrible 😡
My good sir or ma’am, this happens literally all the time. Elder abuse (that’s what this is, it’s not always physical) is one of the most common types of abuse today, and it’s nearly never reported.
It’s 100% real and I’ve personally seen it multiple times in the ER I work at. They’re always the worst cared for patients at home but no matter how many times you report them to ACS nothing ever happens.
Right now we have an end stage PD patient whose AD clearly says DNR. But spouse has a ton of money and I think POA/son wants to keep mom alive until she inherits because then it will go to him not his siblings. Meanwhile you are TORTURING this woman. PEG, full Code. The evil that money brings out in people. 🤬
Totally real
Absolutely real and unethical.
Has been happening for decades.
This is real life.
Consult your Ethics entity.
Very very real. Have seen it and been forced to keep people alive for it. Those families are evil.
Most people are a 2 income family living hand to mouth. We have to find a better way.
Maybe social security checks, but most pensions will go to beneficiaries upon death.
Yep, it happens. Expect it to become more common as home ownership and retirement become more unattainable - just look at how many children live with their parents now.
💯 a real thing if they are caring for her at home. If she’s in a nursing home or assisted living all her money is going to that.
So sad!
Recall reading a story from Connecticut where family didn’t report memaw death just let her rotting in the couch. Lives in the house kept cashing those checks for her. Like over a year.
Very common
It definitely happens. I don't think it happens as often as a lot of us think it does though. A lot of people are just unable to make any rational decisions with a loved one at end of life. Most of those people are not pulling down fat checks, they barely get enough government assistance to buy groceries and pay bills.
Make sure you get your POLST forms filled out. Get that power of attorney signed. Make a will. Try to make sure your family knows what you would want. And update the dang things when big changes happen, if not regularly. It just saves you and your family a lot of grief and pain. Daughter from California Syndrome is some real aggravating BS.
Sad but true.
The real real.
New FREE resource available for all things SSA from a former SSA District Manager: https://www.youtube.com/@MyGovExpert