This is not just about social injustice. This is about not getting what you paid for, which is precisely an environment free of people like that.

For a lot of old people of a certain level of education, this is more important than money. It is bad enough that they have lost their independence, their home, their freedom and most of their dignity without the misery of being confined to an endless Silvio Parnis outing within four walls. That is why they will pay large amounts of money for a place in a private home even if they are offered a place in a church home or state home. Being among like-minded people with whom they can have a conversation is the last thing that is left to them.

A friend’s mother, who sold her large house in Sliema to finance her private residential care, is miserable because she has nobody to talk to in the very expensive private home where she lives. A very intelligent woman who had an active social life and who is highly informed about current affairs, the art and life in general, she now find herself restricted to the constant company of people who are illiterate, who left school at 12, who can barely string a coherent sentence together (because they have always been inarticulate and not because of dementia) and who have no interest in anything and no social graces to speak of.

Another old lady I know, after spending her first couple of years in another expensive private home trying to be sociable by eating with everyone else and trying to have a conversation, now takes her meals in her room because she can no longer bear, after struggling to do so, the ‘feeding time at the zoo’ atmosphere of communal meals where nobody has even the most basic table manners and many of whom don’t even know how to use a knife and fork or eat with their mouth closed.

The government is sending patients to private homes because no beds are available in his own geriatric hospitals.The thing is who is being sent there and not who is paying.

Roseville in H’Attard is full of such patients. Someone said that they are treated differently to those who pay their own fees, such as having single rooms and they have a floor dedicated to those whose fees are paid by the government.

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jan/03/tony-blair-and-ex-ministers-barred-using-uk-embassies-for-own-interests

The fees for the rest are paid by the government. I think this is rather strange as only a few, maybe 2 or 3, do not have any close relatives who could see to their wellbeing and who could be classified as being ‘abandoned’.

Who determines who goes where and by which criteria ?