US nursing homes pushed to brink from recession

US nursing homes pushed to brink from recession

HARTFORD, Conn. — The nation’s nursing homes are perilously close to laying off workers, cutting services — possibly even closing — because of a perfect storm wallop from the recession and deep federal and state government spending cuts, industry experts say.

A Medicare rate adjustment that cuts an estimated $16 billion in nursing home funding over the next 10 years was enacted at week’s end by the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services — on top of state-level cuts or flat-funding that already had the industry reeling.

And Congress is debating slashing billions more in Medicare funding as part of health-care reform. Add it all up, and the nursing-home industry is headed for a crisis, industry officials say.

Former Japanese finance minister is found dead

TOKYO — A former Japanese finance minister who stepped down after appearing to be drunk at an overseas news conference was found dead in his home Sunday, police said, ruling out foul play.

Shoichi Nakagawa, 56, was lying face down in bed when his wife found him in their Tokyo home, a spokesman for the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department said on condition of anonymity due to police policy.

Investigators have ruled out foul play because the room was undisturbed, and they were downplaying the likelihood of suicide. Determining a cause of death will likely “take some time,” the spokesman said, adding that an autopsy will be conducted.

6 members of Supreme Court attend Catholic Mass

WASHINGTON — An American cardinal on Sunday issued a plea for the rights of the unborn at a church service that included Vice President Joe Biden, six members of the Supreme Court and hundreds of members of the legal community.

Five of the six Roman Catholics on the high court — Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy and Samuel Alito — heard the homily by Cardinal Daniel DiNardo; the sixth, Justice Clarence Thomas, did not attend. Justice Stephen Breyer, who is Jewish, was there as well.

Speaking at the annual Red Mass the day before the opening of the Supreme Court term, DiNardo said that people represented by lawyers are “more than clients. ... In some cases the clients are voiceless for they lack influence; in others they are literally voiceless, not yet with tongues and even without names, and require our most careful attention and radical support.”

Ex-Ala. judge accused of trading sex for leniency

MONTGOMERY, Ala. — Herman Thomas had an enviable political record as a black Democrat elected and re-elected in a county overwhelmingly white and increasingly Republican. The respected circuit judge once was the Democratic Party’s choice to be the first black federal judge in south Alabama.

Then his career collapsed under allegations that he brought inmates to his office and spanked them with a paddle. Later, an indictment accused him of sexually abusing male inmates in exchange for leniency. The trial on charges of sodomy, kidnapping, sex abuse, extortion, assault and ethics violations is set to start today.

Thomas, who was known for wearing distinctive bow ties, stepped down from the bench in 2007 after the allegations of paddling surfaced and just ahead of a judicial ethics trial that could have forced him out of office. He was indicted on the more-serious charges this past spring by a Mobile County grand jury. If convicted of the most serious charges — sodomy and kidnapping — he faces from 20 years to life in prison.

Peg Mullen, author of ‘Unfriendly Fire,’ dies

LA PORTE CITY, Iowa — Peg Mullen, an author and former Iowa farm wife who hounded the U.S. military to find the truth about her son’s death in Vietnam, has died. She was 92.

Mullen’s daughter-in-law Jeanne Mullen said Sunday that Mullen passed away Friday at a nursing home in La Porte City.

Peg Mullen wrote the 1995 book “Unfriendly Fire: A Mother’s Memoir” after her son Michael died at age 25 when a U.S. artillery shell fell short and killed him on Feb. 18, 1970, near the South Vietnamese village of Tu Chanh.

“This is the first book you’ve got from the family side of a Vietnam story,” Mullen told The Associated Press in a 1995 interview.

Almost from the day Mullen and her husband, Gene, who died in 1986, learned that Michael had been killed, she tried to get more information about their son’s death from the U.S. military.

Associated Press