Q. What the f**k is the matter with you? First, crotchety is not spelled with a D. Second, what the f**k is the matter with you? I can’t understand what the hell you’re talking about half the time, and the other half I spend wondering what Trump said today, and who will be the latest to be outed for grabbing someone’s bum thirty-four years ago, and important stuff like that. Instead, we got all this schizophrenia and shit. How about something funny every now and then? Why isn’t this called Unrelieved Tedium.com, or is that taken already? Really, what the f**k is the matter with you? DUCCA LORRANGE
A. Well you might ask, Ducca. And thanks for using your real name. Is that a man or a woman’s name?
That reminds me of the Predicament of the Dying AIP.
You know the set up. The hearing starts; the appearance of the AIP – who is in the nursing home, we are told — is going to be waived. And then the somber son gets on the stand, and says he just visited Dad yesterday at the hospice, and he won’t hang for two more weeks, he thinks, but he’s in a coma, and sure needs a Guardian…..and what the hell?
The nursing home attorney, who brought the case, looks embarrassed, not the least because he didn’t bother interviewing his witness before the hearing, and wouldn’t know the AIP if he fell over him. The nursing home, it appears, handed him the file and said “Go”.
Its legal malpractice, but we’re all friends here, right? So why these “hurry up and get a Guardian” cases?
Sometimes, it’s because the AIP is going downhill fast, and the petition was signed and adjourned several times. Let’s face it, the number of Court proceedings in which everything is supposed to be completed in very short order is not long: there’s Guardianship, and ….uh, uh.
There must be something. Habeas corpus or other writs. OK. That’s another.
So the Court has been given this horrific opportunity, lucky ducky. A legal shit sandwich. Let’s play Beat The Clock. Something we’re so good at.
After His or Her Honor is done flogging the nursing home attorney, what is to be done? Is there anything that the family needs the Court to help them with? Do we get a lawyer to be temp guardian, or do one of those single transaction thingies?
This sounds preposterous on its face, but I’ve seen it happen a few times. It should never happen, of course. Don’t mean to shock you, but there’s some bad lawyering [Judging and Law Secretary-ing too] out there, and the poor sods who work the nursing home gig are undoubtedly not well-paid. Like Dick Cheney, the Nursing Homes have Other Priorities.
So, in most cases, I would think, you appoint someone, tell them to do the best they can, which means running around like a nut for two weeks, maybe do a few things for Dying Dad, maybe very little, but it’s all appreciated, because we put the lawyer appointee in a shitty position. Or credential [verb] the somber son, but it usually transpires that, if he was all that capable, we wouldn’t have had this proceeding in the first place.
As anyone who has eyes can see, a reckoning is coming with the nursing homes, who perceive their margins as getting squeezed by an increasingly vigilant HRA/parsimonious [frequently insane]Congress, and by families that don’t want to cooperate in their glorious quest to get paid. The system, if this is what it is, teeters towards collapse, like most things that teeter eventually do.
The bigger point is that the installation of a guardian is a big, cumbersome deal, and before we go to all that trouble, we should have a legitimate reason to do it, and enough time to do it right.
The need for a streamlined proceeding to enable nursing homes to get their Medicaid, from customers who don’t have families who want to cooperate in the endeavor – or no families at all – has been a screaming need for 30 years, at least. Why are we still doing guardianships in these cases? It is a waste of court time, and frequently a fruitless exercise, especially when the AIP is at the very end of life. And we all know for whose benefit these proceedings are being brought. Why not a frank disclosure of what has been going on, some hearings, and then design a special proceeding around it? Isn’t this what State Legislatures do, or am I being jejeune?
What does jejeune mean anyway? I don’t want to look it up.
This is the 2010s; if we can design a computer algorithm for an online radio station that plays only music you despise [All Adele Radio!!], we can do this. We’re Americans.
Another Tangent: Did you ever wonder whether Algorithm was named after Al Gore? Me neither. Okay, back to the blog.
Just to show you that I am dedicated to my vast readership and all their concerns, the more pointless the better, and as a public service, I am donating this all-purpose Political Blog Bullshit Story Creation Template. If you read Mediate, HuffPo or any right wing equivalent, you’ve wasted untold days of your life reading thousands of examples of this click-bate political/celebrity stuff. Could you imagine the horror of having that job of pumping out this bilge, day after tedious day? Reading it is little better.
Well, this solves it. Use it this morning, make two or three of your own to quench your thirst, so to speak, and it will tide you over for the day. You can now ignore all of these stories clogging the net waves, the vast toxic wave of sludge coursing through our public discourse. They all go something like this:
- Big Celebrity/Nothing Burger Low Life whose name you’ve heard/Person tangentially related to one
- Praises/condemns/makes idiotic, ambiguous or ignorant statement
ABOUT
- Trump/Prominent Dem/other celebrity/other Nothing Burger/own sex life
- And is condemned/praised/ignored
By
- Other prominent celebrity etc.
See how easy! You now have 12 extra hours this week to do whatever you want to do with your life. Congratulations.
Write a sonnet, go online and buy an extra present that no one really wants or needs, spend extra time flossing, whatever. No, you don’t have to thank me. Just trying to be helpful here.
Until next time, remember, ex nihilo nihil fit. I should know.