They’d lose all of their business, right? People aren’t going to pay for that nonsense. They’ll choose a different luxury hotel.

Now imagine the Ritz-Carlton teaming up with the Four Seasons, the St. Regis, and every other luxury hotel in America, and collectively deciding to charge exorbitant prices for flaming piles of dogshit.

This is the current state of America’s senior care industry.

All of the available options are varying levels of expensive dogshit.

And I’ve experienced it from the inside.

👉 If you’re the person in charge, the worst thing you can possibly do is defer responsibility to a subordinate — the buck stops with you. Always.

👉 Go launch a senior care company that operates with heart, transparency, and technology. Not only is it a goldmine, the world f*cking needs it.

And now — the story behind why this advice matters. 👇

It began with a strange text message from my husband’s aunt:

“Can you have Bren call me? I’m concerned about Judy.”

Bren is my husband, and Judy is his mother.

At the time, Judy was an active, independent, and generally healthy 76-year-old who had been living on her own since her husband passed away a decade earlier.

She was sharp-witted, funny, and always had a packed social calendar.

But when she called her sister to complain about all of her demanding houseguests —worrying about how she was going to feed them — we knew something was very wrong.

She didn’t have any houseguests. 😔

—

The last three years have been hell.

Watching a parent devolve into dementia is horrifying, of course. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. But to add insult to injury, this experience revealed the absolutely shameful practices of the senior care industry.

This is a national crisis that no one seems to be talking about—

The second-largest generation in American history is about to enter a calamitous system that is not only NOT ready for them — it doesn’t seem to care.

I’m going to preface this entire story by saying that, as a family, we’re incredibly fortunate. Before my husband’s father passed away, he set up Judy’s retirement investments to ensure that she would have a healthy income for life.

So once it became unfeasible for us to care for her ourselves, our goal was to find the best assisted living community for her — not just an affordable one.

(I couldn’t imagine enduring this process on a restricted income, or having to rely on public assistance — and my heart breaks for the people who are in that situation.)

I set out on the grand tour of all the top-rated care communities in the wealthy suburbs of Philadelphia to find Judy a new home where she would receive both the care she needed — and the lifestyle she deserved.

But what I found was more incompetence (with a larger price tag) than any other industry I had ever encountered.

This experience made me dive deep into the $90 billion dollar assisted living industry, and I was shocked by what I discovered.

I thought that with a budget like ours, we would have plenty of quality care communities to choose from for Judy’s new home. And after reviewing over a dozen, we chiseled down our list to just two.

But here’s the infuriating part—

Narrowing our options down to two care communities wasn’t an exercise in seeking added benefits. It was an exercise in avoiding severe deficiencies. 

Many of the care communities we considered threw up immediate red flags:

🚩 Sales people weren’t returning calls, or getting back to me with vital information they promised to provide. (If a sales person isn’t even communicating with you, there’s zero chance of anyone picking up the phone once they’re deducting rent from your bank account).

🚩 I was being shown beautiful “demo units”, but when I would insist on seeing actual units, they were small, dark, dirty, and one even smelled like sewage. 🤢

🚩 Staff members were glued to their phones and acting like our mere existence was a huge inconvenience to them.

🚩 And not a single care community offered any kind of communication platform or process for family members to stay updated on their loved one’s care after they moved in.

The fourth red flag was what concerned me the most — mainly because it was consistent across every single care community I visited. In a world where my doggy daycare sends me:

…how is possible that the caregiving facilities we’re trusting with the lives of our parents are this f*cking opaque?!

After weeks of research, we eventually settled on a care community which, for the purposes of this article, I will refer to as Hell Manor — a gorgeous luxury property that was operated by a major senior care company.

It had an indoor pool, a movie theater, a library, and even a bar. 🍷

And notably for us, it was the only care community that offered two-bedroom apartments — which was important since my husband and I lived two hours away, and planned to frequently visit overnight.

With all the stress we had endured personally caring for Judy over the previous six months, the relief we felt finally making the decision to leave her in the care of trained professionals was intoxicating.

That relief was horribly short-lived.

Not long after Judy’s initial onset of dementia, doctors prescribed new medications which stabilized her cognition quite well.

By the time we moved her into Hell Manor, her cognitive symptoms were just a little bit of confusion and forgetfulness — not hallucinations or delusions. As long as she took her meds, ate well, and had social stimulation, she was very close to being back to her old self.

With all of this in mind, we needed her care plan to include:

This was in addition to standard services included in the base rent, like meals, housekeeping, and laundry.

We were informed our requested services would be a “Level 3” care plan (whatever that means).

The price for all this?

$10k per month. Yikes.

But Judy had just enough income to cover it, and we wanted the best possible care for her, so it seemed like the right decision…

Famous last words.

Within a few days of Judy settling into her new home, a personal caregiver that WE had hired to help with the transition reported that Judy wasn’t always receiving her medications, and at times, was even being given the wrong medications.

We leapt into action, and requested an immediate meeting with Hell Manor’s Executive Director. We also asked for a log of the medications that had been given to Judy so we could take it to her doctor and find out if she was in any danger.

We called and called. The Executive Director’s voice mailbox was full. Emails went unanswered. 

So we got in the car, drove two hours, and showed up at her office door. 

Since she couldn’t ignore us once we were standing in front of her, she spouted the appropriate lip service, apologizing for the errors, and telling us that she would look into the problem.

But the logs? Well, those don’t exist. Apparently. 

To this day, I don’t know if they truly don’t log medications, or if they just didn’t want to give us those logs. But she told us they don’t log medications.

And she also said that we should direct any concerns about Judy’s medications to the nurse on duty.

WTF — the Executive Director was deferring responsibility to an hourly employee.

My brother-in-law, who lived closer than we did, began taking time off work and showing up daily, around meal times and med times. It was more of the same.

Judy’s medications were missing, late, or wrong — and to top it off, she wasn’t being given meals regularly. Every time he was there, he had to chase down staff to give her food and vital medication.

The excuse they made for Judy’s neglect was that they were under-staffed — every time. So I hopped on LinkedIn, and looked up the company’s VP of Clinical Operations & Compliance. ✊

I wrote him an urgent message explaining what was happening, and requesting an immediate call.

Just like Hell Manor’s Executive Director had kicked responsibility down the ladder, so had the VP of Clinical Operations & Compliance.

I received a call from the Regional Clinical Director, who reluctantly agreed to a meeting, which I attended with both my husband and my brother-in-law. By this point, I had begun keeping a record of all the instances of neglect that we witnessed, so I sent it to her for review before our meeting. 

We were not f*cking around.

But the Regional Clinical Director was. We asked about her plans to address the chronic under-staffing, and she simply threw her team under the bus. She claimed that when she was doing their job, she was able to serve far more residents with far better accuracy. 

There were no plans to increase the staffing levels. 

In her eyes, the staff’s complaints about being short-handed had no merit. They were just not as talented as she was. 🙄

Well — whatever the issue was, it had to be resolved immediately. Our mother’s health was declining rapidly as a result of their negligence. So we made a deal— 

Until we could be sure that the clinical operations were back on track, the staff would text me a photo of the pills in Judy’s hand every time they administered a dose.

One simple action would verify:

The Regional Clinical Director agreed to this temporary measure to regain our confidence, and asked for 24-hours to make sure this new policy was communicated to the entire team…

But 24-hours came and went, and I never received a single medication text message. 

Three days later, I moved into Hell Manor.

And nothing could have prepared me for what I was about to experience.

When I arrived, Judy was in such a delusional state that she couldn’t find the front door. I was shouting to her from the hallway, listening to her wandering around the apartment, opening closets and bathrooms, unable to follow the sound of my voice.

Once I got inside, the smell hit me. The apartment was filthy. 

But more importantly, Judy was starving. It was 3pm, and she hadn’t had lunch. She had lost a ton of weight, was very frail, and was having trouble walking.

So I immediately took her to the dining room, where I was told there was no food. 

What in the actual f*ck.

Meals were supposed to be available every day 7am - 7pm, but a sheepish staff member who looked about 12 years old said they wouldn’t be ready to give Judy anything until dinner service started at 4:30.

So l ran out to get her food, and then hunkered down. I was not going to leave her side until I was confident she was safe.

Over the next 10 days, the neglect I witnessed probably would have put her in the hospital (or worse) had I not been there to intervene. When I tell people that I “went undercover in a senior care facility”, they comically imagine me dressing up like one of the Golden Girls and blending in.

But what actually happened was far more sinister. 

I never planned to be “undercover”.  But no one was taking care of Judy –ya know– the thing we were paying them $10k per month to do.

So they simply didn’t notice that I was living there.

In the 10 days that I spent living at Hell Manor, not once did anybody:

She was being left alone to rot in an apartment.

And due to her neglect, Judy had quickly devolved into severely incoherent and paranoid dementia. Over those 10 days, I spent my time chasing down food and medication, and doing my best to comfort her.

I had moved in as a temporary measure to make sure Judy was cared for while we worked through the operational deficiencies with management. But I quickly realized that this company was criminally negligent, and I certainly wasn’t going to be able to fix that.

I began the process of moving Judy out — right under their nose.

Since leaving Hell Manor three years ago, Judy has been living at a different care facility (the other one on our original list of two).

It’s almost as expensive as Hell Manor. She’s in their memory care unit. She was never able to re-stabilize her cognition after the neglect she experienced at Hell Manor. 😔

A friend or family member visits Judy every few days. She’s being given her medication. She’s being fed. And she’s safe.

But that bare minimum is all we can expect.

A few months ago, I received a phone call from a random hospice service to discuss Judy’s recent evaluation, and work through the steps of moving her into hospice care.

Wait. What evaluation? And who are you?

The care facility had brought in a third-party hospice service, evaluated Judy without our consent, handed over her medical records, and gave them my phone number.

And as shocking as it was to receive a phone call from a stranger saying “hey, your mother is dying”, the even more disgusting part is that I brought in my own hospice evaluator — who outright refuted that claim.

My theory? Judy has been living there for three years now. They want her out so they can bring in a new resident at a higher rent.

But even with all that, this facility remains the best available option for us. We’re paying Ritz-Carlton prices for a Motel 6, but we’re stuck there.

And over a million Americans are in the same boat.

-Kristin

P.S. — If you’re dealing with a loved one stuck in this industry, I’m here for you. Please reach out anytime for support. ❤