Staking Out New Territory for Nursing Home Reform

Larry Roth is starting over yet again. At age 77, he’s lost count of how many times his life has changed.

Two years ago, he moved from San Francisco to the Westside to be close to his two sons. But simply establishing a new residence was not enough for Roth. He needed some purpose to his life.

Roth is opening the Southern California office for CANHR--California Advocates for Nursing Home Reform--the organization he founded 14 years ago in San Francisco. CANHR’s mission is to educate long-term health-care consumers about their rights under the law. The goal is to create a united voice for nursing home reform and to provide humane alternatives to institutionalization.

“If a spouse enters a nursing home--the cheapest is $3,000 a month--it’s easy to go bankrupt,” he said in an interview at his home in Santa Monica. “We teach people how to avoid that because if a person doesn’t know what could happen, a lifetime of savings can be wiped out. It happened to me.”

Roth sold his plastics business when he was 62, but the combination of his wife’s illness and his own heart surgery absorbed his savings--even though he carried three types of insurance.

Appalled, he founded CANHR with the help of a lawyer. Within a year, the demands of the older population forced them to triple the staff.

He moved to Southern California fully aware that there would be plenty of work to do on his cause once he got here. In San Francisco, he said, nearly half the calls the office received were from south of Santa Barbara.

Another major issue for Roth is that many long-term-care residents are isolated from the public eye and suffer from serious neglect and abuse. Such problems as misuse of drugs, unsanitary conditions, understaffing and general lack of care have been well documented, but neither the residents nor their relatives are aware of their rights.

For more information on CANHR, call Roth at (310) 458-1507. The organization relies on donations and grants. There is no fee for services, but there is a $10 cost for lawyer referrals, which goes back to the organization to cover printing costs.