On Tuesday, Aug. 22, The Sun ran an insightful editorial about the national crisis in nursing home care. But the editorial failed to adequately note that Florida is, by far, the worst offender in the country.

The recent study by the federal Health Care Financing Agency (HCFA) noted two important things:

1. Short staffing is directly linked to the unnecessary suffering and premature death of nursing home residents.

2. The for-profit chains (which dominate the Florida landscape) are the worst offenders.

According to Dr. Charlene Harrington of the University of California-San Francisco, Florida leads the nation in short staffing and has 300 percent more violations than the national average. We are below the national average in most care categories and even make the bottom 10 in two of them.

The major nursing home chains are in deep financial trouble for two reasons:

1. They engaged in lavish spending and an uncontrolled and irresponsible buying spree in the early 1990s, taking on more debt than they could handle.

2. They engaged in widespread fraud and mismanagement (as chronicled in a 1995 GAO report to Congress) that resulted in the broad-reaching fraud reduction measures in the 1997 Balanced Budget Act. (The federal government has since recovered hundreds of millions of dollars that nursing home corporations stole from taxpayers.)

Isn't it time we accept the fact that warehousing the elderly in institutional settings is a failed experiment? We need to shift away from institutional settings as the primary option and toward community-based care systems, adult foster care, home help programs and other such proven concepts.

We can save taxpayers money, allow seniors to age with dignity, and make institutionalized nursing care an option of last resort.

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