SEIU Executive Vice President Calls on Alliance for Quality Nursing Home Care to Come Clean about Ads’ Scare Tactics

For Immediate Release:     Contact: Michelle Ringuette
22 August 2007            202-730-7234 

SEIU Executive Vice President for Long Term Care Gerry Hudson said the following in an open letter to Alan Rosenbloom, AQNHC President, in response to the Alliance’s denial that recent ad campaign was meant to scare seniors through warrantless claims about threats to Medicare funding:

“The evidence contradicts your recent communications on the matter of quality of care for America’s seniors. To borrow a turn of phrase, it appears ‘the Alliance doth protest too much.’ The facts are simple:

• The Alliance for Quality Nursing Home Care has published newspaper ads and taken out television ads that both target politicians who support SCHIP and seek to scare seniors into believing the current SCHIP bill, if enacted, threatens their care (“Behind those nursing-home ads,” Palm Beach Post, 8/7).

• While nursing homes are pleading poverty and the Alliance for Quality Nursing Home Care is paying for manipulative ads that endanger the funding of SCHIP, HCR Manor Care’s CEO Paul Ormond stands to make upwards of $186 million dollars in the Carlyle buyout deal.

If the industry were truly concerned about the quality of care for America’s seniors, they would invest their resources in improving care.  Instead they plead poverty as they drain hundreds of millions of dollars out of the public coffers.  Since two-thirds of HCR Manor Care’s revenues – and indeed of the revenues of the industry as a whole – are coming from public dollars, we are left to ask who is in fact is paying for the television ads? To again paraphrase William Shakespeare, ‘something’s rotten in the state of nursing home care in this country.’ ”