Who could possibly have guessed this would happen? That the federal government would put the Saratoga Center nursing home in Ballston Spa "on a watch list of the most troubled facilities in the nation."
Or that staffing and other cuts there have led to terrible conditions and consequences for patients?
Ballston Spa happens to be the seat of Saratoga County government, which used to own and operate the nursing home, then called Maplewood Manor. Saratoga is the most prosperous county in upstate New York, with a booming economy. But costs were increasing at the Manor, so the county privatized it in 2015.
The workers and their union, the Civil Service Employees Association, warned against this, but no one else seemed to care. No politicians or pundits protested, as far as I am aware, except, ahem, for me. I wrote two opinion pieces about it for the online Ballston Journal, in August and December 2014 (which I believe I linked to this blog), predicting the bad consequences which now in fact have happened.
I don't work for the Journal anymore, but am putting the matter on record again here, to provide further evidence of the broken state of politics.
