By Steve Moran

I hate it when I see anyone having a victim mentality. I think there have been times when senior living has embraced victim mentality and it never serves well. That being said, sometimes there are real victims and in those cases, it is worth fighting for justice.

Senior living or more accurately assisted living is the victim of horrible, unfair reporting by the Los Angeles Times.

On April 1, 2020, they published an article titled “As coronavirus tears through nursing homes, families face an impossible choice” that had a cover photo of Kensington Redondo Beach, an assisted living community.

As you read through the article you will see the authors seem to be clueless or perhaps even deliberately misleading in writing as if skilled nursing and assisted living are exactly the same thing.

Why Do I Bother?

We must speak out when this happens. We need to tell the truth. We should flood the LA Times with emails and phone calls politely telling them they got it wrong and asking them to be responsible when writing about senior living.

Not Just an Academic Issue

This is critical for the financial health of senior living. It is even more critical for the health of our nation’s elders. My fear is that the LA Times and other media outlets will scare older people and their families away from senior living and that in fear, these seniors will die or have poor quality lives in the last chapters of their lives because they have been encouraged to fear something they should actually embrace.

Call To Action

I am not sure I have ever done this before but I beg you to call them or send them an email asking them to make this right. I did send an email asking for a comment for this article, as of the time this was submitted for publication I have not received a response.

I run the foremost senior living blog site in the country www.seniorlivingforesight.net and I am going to run an article about how your reporters can’t be bothered to either understand and clarify the difference between nursing homes and assisted living communities.

Your title says nursing home but your cover picture is of an assisted living community. They are licensed differently and they serve very different populations of older people. They also have very different staffing patterns.

What I can’t figure out is if it was a deliberate falsehood, or your reporters could not be bothered to give factual information.

I am hoping you will give me a statement about why you did this. 

If you want to add your weight to this important issue here is the contact information from their website:

Phone:  (877) 554-4000  I have not tried it but I assume you will get a message box.

Email form: https://www.latimes.com/la-contact-our-readers-rep-htmlstory.html

If we can get one or two publications to start getting it right, they all will.  

This is super important in this very difficult time.