Nothing’s Too Good For Grandma…Unless It Costs Money

By Jocelyn Geboy in News on Dec 28, 2005 10:49PM

We’re revising our opinion of the Sun-Times. It doesn’t hurt that Roeper gave us a nice shoutout in Today’s Chicago Woman, but that’s not the reason. Despite our having issues with other aspects of the Sun-Times, it seems to us that they can bust out the investigative reporting hats now and again. Although it didn’t help us get our booted car out of the realm of the cubed, it was the Sun-Times that did the big stories on the shady towing practices of the city, and ran a special section on the hired truck scandal (is anyone in trouble for that yet?).

So, now they’re telling us that the Illinois legislature is willing to kow-tow to the nursing home lobby (this seems like something straight out of a Simpsons episode), and jack around with a bill to protect seniors from potentially living with sex offenders.

Wha?? Seems like there’s sex offenders living in nursing homes. Get out of jail, do not pass go, into nursing home. We’re still trying to wrap our heads around this one. Don’t you actually have to be, uhhh, old and sort of in need of care? But the article says that in April, “100 registered sex offenders -- half of them age 50 or younger -- and 61 parolees convicted of non-sex crimes were living alongside the elderly and ill in long-term care centers statewide.” WTF??

Right now there’s a law whose fine points call for all people in nursing homes to be subject to criminal background checks to protect everyone in facilities from ex-cons. But under pressure from said nursing home lobby, people would just have to be on the honor system and admit to felonies and crimes themselves. That seems plausible. Let me live in your nursing home. I’m a rapist.

The nursing home lobby doesn’t want the homes to have to foot the $10 bill per person for the background checks, or they want the state to pay for it. The proposed changes in the law also want to do away with a requirement that registered sex offenders automatically get the smackdown from sharing bedrooms with other nursing home residents. Yeah, why make it hard for them?

Image via Weitzluz.com