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maddezmom

(135,060 posts)
Wed Jul 18, 2012, 07:55 AM Jul 2012

Dark side of a Bain success

A for-profit health company bought by Bain -- that Romney profits from -- has exploded in size and tales of neglect

Clockwise from top left: Brendan Blum, Sergey Blashchishen, Matthew Meyer and Lindsey Poteet. Aspen Education already faced a wrongful death lawsuit over Meyer when Bain and CRC Health Group bought the company in 2006. Six deaths since the takeover, including Blum, Blashchishen and Poteet, have generated either lawsuits or complaints of neglect.

It seemed a world away from the executive suites of Bain Capital when Dana Blum, a recent widow living in Portland, Ore., made the fateful decision to send her son Brendan to Youth Care, a residential program for troubled teens located in the suburbs of Salt Lake City.

Brendan, a 14-year-old boy with Asperger’s syndrome, had been extremely aggressive for years; he was even arrested a few times after attacking members of his family. Local therapists hadn’t helped, and six months after her husband died, Dana was frantically casting about for solutions. A consultation with UCLA’s neuropsychiatric unit convinced her that Youth Care’s therapeutic and educational program would finally make a difference.

Four months into his stay there, Brendan had earned a reputation as a temper-prone student who tried to shirk his obligations. So on the afternoon of June 27, when he complained to medical staff that he felt very sick, as if something were “crawling around” in his stomach, his concerns were dismissed. After 11 p.m., he woke up, complaining of stomach pain, and defecated in his pants. The on-duty monitors took him to the Purple Room, a makeshift isolation room used to segregate misbehaving students. There, he suffered a long night of agony, howling in pain and repeatedly vomiting and soiling himself. According to court transcripts and police reports, the two poorly paid monitors on duty did little more than offer him water, Sprite and Pepto-Bismol. They never telephoned the on-call nurse and waited until nearly 2 a.m. to contact the on-call supervisor, only to leave a voicemail. There was little else they felt they could do — Youth Care’s protocol on emergency services meant they were too low on the totem pole to call 911 themselves.

“They didn’t trust our judgment in emergency situations,” explains Josh Randall, a former Youth Care residential monitor, who wasn’t on duty that night. “If you’re working for $9.50 an hour on the graveyard shift, you don’t want to buck the system.” At any rate, the monitors had little expertise in how to respond — it was an entry-level job requiring only a GED, plus a CPR and safety course overseen by Youth Care itself.

more: http://www.salon.com/2012/07/18/dark_side_of_a_bain_success/singleton/

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Dark side of a Bain success (Original Post) maddezmom Jul 2012 OP
GAO webdiva Jul 2012 #1
I'm not surprised Omaha Steve Jul 2012 #2

webdiva

(29 posts)
1. GAO
Wed Jul 18, 2012, 11:41 AM
Jul 2012

This article mentions the Government Accountability Office reports from 2007 to 2009. There are at least four of them, and here are the links:

GAO Investigation Documents/Video:

http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d08146t.pdf

http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d08713t.pdf

http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d08696t.pdf

http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d09719t.pdf

" target="_blank">

(Greg Kutz, VIDEO of testimony to US Congress)

And here are a couple excerpts:

During 2005 alone, 33 states reported 1,619 staff members involved in incidents of abuse in residential programs. GAO could not identify a more concrete number of allegations because it could not locate a single Web site, federal agency, or other entity that collects comprehensive nationwide data.

And in another report:

Nineteen states have no laws or regulations related to the use of seclusions or restraints in schools.

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