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Governor Patton’s Sex Scandal –

And The Nursing Home Patients Affected By It

By Pat Pending

This week, we have been treated to a hot sex scandal involving Kentucky’s Governor, Paul Patton.  The accusation is that the Governor was trading government favors with Ms. Tina Conner in exchange for sex.  Ms. Conner is the owner of a nursing home and other businesses, which are subject to many government regulations and therefore can be seriously helped or harmed by the government. 

While, of course, radio announcers and others are having a rip-roaring time with this situation, comparing Patton to Bill Clinton, remembering Clinton’s alleged rape of Juanita Broaddrick, who also owned a nursing home, and imagining all kinds of wild sex scenes, the basic plot line, unfortunately, is pretty typical.  The Governor had lots of power, which he could (and possibly did) use to help and/or harm Ms. Conner’s business interests, depending upon whether or not she pleased him.  One important question that needs to be considered is how the government regulations and this scandal have affected the nursing home patients.

Nursing homes are highly regulated and controlled by government, supposedly for the benefit of the patients.  I would like to suggest to you that this Patton scandal is a perfect illustration of how government regulations frequently (or usually) harm the very people they are supposed to protect, and how the people who are supposedly protected by the regulations would be far better off without them. 

The government inspects the nursing homes and can fine them or shut them down if they fail to comply with certain standards.  In addition, the government is a very large customer of nursing homes, due to Medicare payments.  Ms. Conner alleges that, while she was having the affair with the Governor, he helped her get more Medicare money, and, after she put an end to the affair, the Governor got revenge by finding her nursing home in violation of numerous regulations and by ending the Medicare payments, which caused her nursing home to declare bankruptcy. 

We don’t know all the facts yet, but let’s assume two possible scenarios and see how the patients have been helped or harmed by the government regulations that supposedly were designed to protect them.  First, let’s assume that Ms. Conner’s nursing home is of good quality and takes good care of its patients.  In that case, the Governor’s use of his power to put the nursing home out of business has harmed the patients who were depending upon that nursing home for their care.  Those patients will now have their lives disrupted and will have to seek out an alternative form of care that is less desirable to them (or they would have chosen the alternative in the first place)  Maybe they will have to go to a nursing home that is farther away from their family or to a home that is not as clean, or to a home that has staff who are not as caring.  In any case, they will be harmed by being prevented from using the services of the home they preferred.

Alternatively, let’s assume that Ms. Conner’s nursing home has been providing substandard service all along.  In that case, the Governor has been preventing the regulators from taking the nursing home to task for its violations.  This means that the patients, who were depending upon the government to protect them, have been unprotected, thanks to the Governor’s selling them out in exchange for sexual favors. 

Under either alternative, the nursing home patients would have been better off without the government's "protection".  In the first instance, they would not be deprived of their favored nursing home by vengeful regulators, and, in the second instance, if they had known that they had no real protection from the government, they would have been more inclined to make their own inquiries in order to protect themselves from substandard nursing home practices.    Under either alternative, the nursing home patients have been shafted by the very government that was supposed to be protecting them. 

Of course, that’s exactly the way the script plays out over and over again, with the so-called protector harming the so-called protected.  As usual, the government official is given power, ostensibly to protect somebody who supposedly is incapable of protecting himself (in this case nursing home patients, but it could be children, the mentally retarded or mentally ill, or any of us, since the government considers us all to be incompetent).  This power then is abused and misused for the benefit of the government official, at the expense of the very people it was supposed to protect.  It’s a very sad situation, but also very common. 

So what’s the solution?

Sadly, there are many people who would say the solution is to give the government still more power – creating still more regulations that create even more opportunity for abuse.  Clearly, the answer to these abuses of power is not to give the government still more power!  Instead, the answer is to get rid of the root causes of the problem –namely the initial excessive grant of government power.

But, you may ask, who will protect the nursing home patients if not the benevolent government?  It’s time to take off the rose-colored glasses, recognize that the “benevolent government” has not protected these people, and imagine a new scenario in which the nursing home patients would be better off.

Under the new scenario, there may continue to be government inspectors who rate nursing homes, but there will also be other, private inspectors who rate the homes.  Neither the government inspectors nor the private inspectors would have the right to fine the home or shut it down, but they all would post their ratings at the door of the nursing home as well as on the Internet, so patients and prospective patients and their families can check out the homes.  Based on these ratings and their own independent investigations, the patients and their families would decide which nursing homes to use.

Then, instead of finding it more profitable to snuggle up to the government, the nursing homes would instead find it more profitable to do a great job of serving their patients and their patients’ families.   This, of course, would make the nursing home patients much better off.  They would then be able to choose the nursing home that provides what is most important to them, not be dependent on some government official who is much more interested in his own perks. 

By taking the power away from government, much of the problem will be solved.  Obviously, there will still be nursing homes that are sloppy or do not provide the best service, but the patients will be in the best position to protect themselves and probably even put the bad operators out of business simply by being free to take their business somewhere else.  When consumers are free to vote with their feet and with their pocketbook, they have much greater protection against poor quality service than when they are merely dependent upon government regulators to "take care of them".

In addition to making the patients better off, such a policy would also make the good nursing home operators better off.  They would not find it necessary to curry favor with government officials in order to be in business.  Instead, they could put all of their energy and other resources into currying favor with their customers.

By the way, I just overheard a conversation about the governor's scandal, in which the speaker said, "The Governor has been selling influence for years.  The only difference in this case is the form of payment."  

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