MPTF: And the Survey Says — No Room for Old People

Its latest survey is nothing but another PR hack’s Hail Mary pass to divert the negativity that is being heaped with growing momentum onto the Board

In a recent survey to the entertainment industry, the MPTF asks for help in defining what taking care of our own will mean for tomorrow.

The survey, which purports itself to be “confidential and anonymous” starts with a glaringly intrusive act of socio / racial profiling. This mental pat-down at the gloved and lubed cyber hands of the MPTF Board would make any TSA Screener envious, and like the infamous full body scanner that reveals everything but what you are thinking, the MPTF survey does it one better — it reveals what the MPTF is thinking.

Surveys are designed to achieve a response, and to meet an objective. That’s Survey Writing 101. However the MPTF tries to disguise the true nature of the survey, the objective is clear: Promote an MPTF that should be better known for the social services it provides to the entertainment community, and downplay the MPTF’s urgently important role in providing long term and elder care.

The MPTF doesn’t give a s— about what you have to say. The questions make that extremely clear. The survey is a promotional tool that first determines the demographic of the survey taker, and second promotes the ancillary services that has grown from the MPTF Board’s obvious disdain for treating and housing the elderly. And … if you’ve hung in there till the end, it will demand your name and e-mail address in order to put you in the running for a ‘set of steak knives’, or whatever carrot they are holding out to reward the shills that buy into this scam.

The survey sets itself up as presenting the MPTF as a flexible entity that conforms to change in the industry. This smokescreen obscures the original, and more-relevant-than-ever mission of the MPTF. We Take Care of Our Own, the founding charter of the MPTF, is not even referred to in its original context, other than to bastardize the spirit of the MPTF motto in making the survey taker think that their responses will define its new meaning.

Nothing could be further from the truth, and in this statement the MPTF continues its litany of lies and half-truths. Remember, this survey is coming from an MPTF leadership that has made it very plain – sick and old people don’t belong on the MPTF Campus.

How wonderful it would be if this survey was genuine in addressing the prospect of long-term care, and in doing so canvassing the feelings and opinions of those who have the potential to avail themselves of those services. Imagine a groundswell of positive responses to the question of, “Do you feel the Long Term Care facility (nursing home) provides an important and relevant service to the industry?”

Would a landslide opinion in the affirmative sway the direction that the MPTF is taking in providing care for the very elderly and infirm? Would a large percentages of clicks in the Yes button divert the MPTF’s direction to pawn off long term care to foreign entities that are years away from even considering an MPTF plan?

That postulation is moot. They didn’t even ask the question.

What??? You mean that the issue that has been on the minds of everyone associated with the MPTF wasn’t even brought up? Something must be wrong. Stop the presses! Rewrite! The glaring omission of the issues that have Katzenberg scrambling for cover when approached at dinner parties with that question makes this survey immaterial. It doesn’t mean bupkis.

The survey is nothing but another PR hack’s Hail Mary pass to divert the negativity that is being heaped with growing momentum onto the MPTF board. The survey denigrates the memory of all those who have been supported by the MPTF in their final years, and that includes my own mother who passed away at the Motion Picture Home two weeks ago.

The survey is a prop police car positioned in full view of the residents in order to intimidate, a Passover seder that never happened, an elderly cry to be let back home after transitioning to another facility at the hands of the MPTF.

The survey is an obstacle to the issues that are affecting motion picture and industry healthcare, and the continuum of care that is now lacking on the Motion Picture Home campus.

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