Kansas Health Institute | Information For Policy Makers. Health for Kansans.

HUTCHINSON — For most of the past year, David Farris, 55, has lived in a nursing home here.

He hates everything about the place.

“It’s like living in a prison,” Farris said. “It’s terrible. The food is terrible. There’s nothing to do. You just sit around all day. They feed you, give you pills twice a day and a shower twice a week. That’s it.

“Before my father passed away, he did everything he could to keep from going to a nursing home,” he said. “I can see why.”

Farris ended up in the nursing home after a Nov. 6, 2008 accident in which he fell about five feet onto concrete. The fall left him with a fractured wrist and a crushed pelvis.

“My right pelvis was broken in six places,” he said. “My left pelvis was broken in three places. Man, that hurt.”

At the time, Farris, who is divorced and estranged from his children, said he was working at a hog farm near Marquette.

“I had health insurance,” he said. “It paid the bills for a month or two, but after that it quit because I couldn’t work and I have no money.”

Farris is now able to walk a little with a cane.

“My balance isn’t all that good,” he said. “I’ll use a wheelchair if I’m doing something like going to the doctor or when my hips get to where they hurt too much.”

His right wrist still gives him trouble.

“I broke a bunch of the little bones that are in there,” he said. “They’ve healed, but I can’t squeeze to make a fist or bend it more than 20 or 30 degrees forward and 10 degrees backward. I can’t lift much, and I’m not supposed to push anything that’s heavy.”

He said he likes animals and hopes to recover well enough to perhaps work as a veterinarian’s assistant. But he doesn’t know if he’ll be able to work again.

“It’s going to depend on what happens with my pelvis,” he said, “because, right now, I’m missing about one inch of bone, The doctor says it’ll take about two years to see how much of it grows back.”

Farris is in the nursing home because he’s unable to work, has no money and has nowhere else to go. Because he’s poor and disabled, Medicaid covers his stay.

With help from a case manager at the Prairie Independent Living Resource Center, he has applied for Medicaid-funded services designed to help people with physical disabilities live in a community setting — a small apartment, most likely — rather than a nursing home.

He has been on the program’s waiting list for almost a year.

“This makes no sense to me,” he said. “I was told Medicaid is paying this place $4,300 a month for me to be here. But then I see ads in the Hutch paper for apartments with all bills paid for $465 a month — and those are the expensive ones.

“Just get me some furniture and I can get by for a lot less than what they’re paying this place,” Farris said. “I don’t need to be here. I don’t want to be here. I can’t stand this place.”