Googling “nursing home neglect lawsuit” will make your stomach churn. Deanna Kay Mahoney died of sepsis in a hospital in Des Moines, Iowa, after her bedsores were allegedly left untended for so long that they became infected. John Curtright of Kansas City, Kansas, died of the same thing, and he was apparently displaying signs of malnourishment by the time his daughter checked him out of his nursing home to bring him to a nearby emergency room.

Across several facilities in New York State, human waste and discarded food trays left to fester in residents’ rooms reportedly triggered a rat problem. Mary Jo Staub froze to death after wandering out of her facility in Louisville, Kentucky, and being unable to regain entry. A resident in McHenry, Illinois, claimed his neck was fractured after he was dropped on the floor by a worker who’d been forced to lift patients alone thanks to short staffing.

These are a mere fraction of the nursing home deaths ascribable to profit-driven corner cutting: one Associated Press analysis pinned some forty thousand deaths on neglect in nursing homes in the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, not counting the staggering number of fatalities from the virus itself. In the years since, the sector received a no-strings-attached nine-figure federal windfall, allocating at least some of it to fighting tooth and nail against reforms like improved staffing ratios that could’ve made every one of those atrocities less likely to happen.