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A Times Union report on the state of New York's nursing homes is a catalog of horrors. Lawsuits mention patients left in urine-soaked bedsheets. Gaping bed sores. Feces-contaminated laundry piles. Medications and medical treatments that are delivered erratically, or not at all.

And underlying it all, employees who appear unwilling or unable to provide the necessary care, often because of severe staffing shortages.

This is not how a well-functioning society treats its elderly. Indeed, the laundry list of shoddy care and accusations of downright abuse detailed in reporter Raga Justin's story points to a societal sickness and shame — an incomprehensible shirking of civic responsibility and communal concern.

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This is how we care for our parents and grandparents? This is how the richest........

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