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Abuse of a system that supports people with disabilities and profiting from such acts can never be accepted. An environment in which disabled people can live in peace must be protected.
Megumi Co., an operator of group homes for people with disabilities, has been overcharging residents for food. The total amount has reportedly reached ¥300 million.
The Aichi prefectural government and the Nagoya municipal government have decided to revoke the designation of five Megumi facilities in the prefecture based on the law to extend comprehensive support for persons with disabilities. The Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry also plans to apply the guilt-by-association principle and suspend the operations of about 100 Megumi facilities nationwide, on the grounds that the wrongdoing was committed at an organizational level.
Group homes are facilities where people with intellectual or mental disabilities live in small groups and receive assistance from staff with meals and bathing. Megumi collected three times the actual food costs from residents and diverted the money for the company’s profit.
Doing so is a violation of the ministry’s regulations, which state that group home operators are allowed to collect only the actual cost of food from residents. The company did not provide residents with adequate meals and neglected the human rights of people with disabilities. This is extremely heinous and outrageous.
It is difficult for people with disabilities to express their dissatisfaction with the way they are treated by a facility. Some of the residents had reportedly lost weight because they were not given enough food.
There are 1,800 people living in Megumi facilities across the nation that will no longer be able to operate. The central and local governments should do their utmost to take steps such as securing new homes for these residents so that they will not lose a place to live.
Megumi also engaged in the fraudulent practice of falsifying work records of employees to claim publicly funded remuneration for work that was not done. Criminal charges should also be considered.
In the past, people with disabilities often stayed in large, supervised facilities for long periods of time. To change this situation, the ministry introduced a system of group homes where people with disabilities could live independently in small groups.
This system allows corporations to participate in the operation of group homes, and currently there are more than 170,000 people living in 13,000 facilities nationwide.
The challenge is to ensure the quality of facilities. Apart from Megumi, there is no end to cases of the abuse of residents and fraudulent claims for remuneration. It is a serious situation when facilities that are supposed to place importance on the lives of people with disabilities are treating residents in ways that deny their human dignity.
The national and local governments need to establish a framework to regularly inspect facilities nationwide. It is important to prevent facilities from acting secretively by, for example, introducing a third-party checking function. A situation in which people with disabilities can live as members of the community in facilities that are open to the public must be ensured.
