The company says it is protecting nursing home residents by curbing unnecessary hospital transfers. Whistleblowers allege cost-cutting tactics have endangered the elderly
That’s how companies get away with shit like this: diffusion of responsibility.
No one made a single decision to let seniors die. Instead there is a whole bunch of small decisions, from the top down, that each on their own seem reasonable. The CEO may have given the order to look for ways to increase profit margins. Someone lower down came up with the idea for ‘performance bonuses’. Someone further down the hierarchy had to come up with a metric to tie these bonuses to, then someone below felt pressured by this to be more hesitant before hospitalizing someone.
In the end you end up with a whole chain of decisions where you can’t really point at anyone who made a truly ‘bad’ decision. Every individual decision can be defended as reasonable, but the end result is the company is behaving like a sociopath. The responsibility is spread out over so many people and watered down that no one really can be held responsible.
That’s how companies get away with shit like this: diffusion of responsibility.
No one made a single decision to let seniors die. Instead there is a whole bunch of small decisions, from the top down, that each on their own seem reasonable. The CEO may have given the order to look for ways to increase profit margins. Someone lower down came up with the idea for ‘performance bonuses’. Someone further down the hierarchy had to come up with a metric to tie these bonuses to, then someone below felt pressured by this to be more hesitant before hospitalizing someone.
In the end you end up with a whole chain of decisions where you can’t really point at anyone who made a truly ‘bad’ decision. Every individual decision can be defended as reasonable, but the end result is the company is behaving like a sociopath. The responsibility is spread out over so many people and watered down that no one really can be held responsible.