New York State Senator Michael Balboni was present last Tuesday at the Herricks Senior Center to announce that Governor George Pataki has just signed into law a bill he proposed, to protect seniors in nursing homes, entitled Kathy's Law.

The law was created because at a nursing home in Rochester, New York, a 55-year-old woman, Kathy, in a coma, was impregnated, naturally without her knowledge, by her caregiver. Balboni explained, "This was horrible!"

Balboni continued, "Just think of making the heart wrenching decision to put someone you love in a nursing home and compound that with the possibility that they might be brutalized, raped, or assaulted in the setting of a nursing home. What we found was that a couple of factors have conspired to make nursing homes an opportunity for predators."

He went on, "The first is nursing homes are not like hospitals. In hospitals you have someone coming in and out every hour of the day, whether they are giving medicine, or checking IV or giving patient care. Not so, in nursing homes. You have large spans of time six, seven, eight hours at night when there is just the patient and the aides. So the opportunity for abuse is right there."

"Additionally, unfortunately, in this state, we have not put the proper funding into our nursing home system and therefore we don't always attract the highest caliber of person to take care of the people we love the most," added Balboni. "It's an ironic situation and we need to correct it and change it. Both those factors have conspired to cause this atmosphere of potential problems."

He added, "Attorney General, Dennis Vacco, to his credit, was the first attorney general to aggressively go after these individuals and has returned 109 arrests and indictments against individuals for outrageous behavior ranging from slapping them so they will take their medicine to actual physical sexual abuse. And, what we found is that, unfortunately, some of these people suffer from Alzheimer's, they may be in a coma, or perhaps they cannot speak and they are not able to be witnesses on their own behalf. And so, prior to Cathy's law, it would fall under a 'technical administrative violation' for these types of abuses. Well, ladies and gentleman, the heck with that! That's not the way we treat the people we love the most and the people who have done so much for us in this state."

"This new law that I introduced, with the help of Governor Pataki, now makes it a felony for any type of abuse in the hospital/nursing home setting. For the first time in law we now have a definition, 'a vulnerable elderly person.' And, if you abuse and break that trust you are going to go to jail for a very long time. It is way overdue. There is an old Chinese proverb that states, You judge a society by how you treat your seniors and frankly, to a large extent we haven't been doing the job in this state, but thanks to your opening the door to the senate I was able to play a role in that and that it why I came back so that you could know firsthand what this bill is all about. And this bill was signed today in front of the nursing home in Rochester where the incident occurred," added the senator.

On Oct. 22 Senator Balboni announced that he will be holding Pasta & Politics night at the Mineola Portuguese Center on Jericho Turnpike. It will start at 6 p.m. and it's free. He said, "Here's the deal, if you come and eat our pasta, then you will have to listen to a few minutes of politics!"

Senator Balboni said, "I have had a wonderful, wonderful year thanks to your support and to the support of the people in this district. I can't tell you how wonderful the Senate has been. It is beyond my expectations in terms of quality of work you can do, the things you can achieve and the experiences you can have."

He continued, "I also, from my first year in the Senate, realize how much the late Senator Michael J. Tully did. All his years in office, Mike Tully always made it seem so simple, so easy, to work this district and to bring home the money that is needed for the programs you deserve. Yet I realize that he made it look simple, but it is very, very complex and takes a lot of hard work, but it is very rewarding. So, I would like to thank you, again, for the opportunity."

Balboni went on, "This year I had a lot of very nice successes. Things that I really tried to work for. In December I stood before students at Nassau Community College and asked them how the education system was. They said we can't really afford an education. I said we do all these tuition assistance programs and they said that's fine, but if you're middle class you can't meet the income eligibility levels. So I said you know what we should do, we should eliminate the sales tax on textbooks. And they said, hey that's a great idea."

He continued, "But I went back to my colleagues in both the Senate and Assembly and they said you're crazy. You'll never do it. Guess what, we did it. We eliminated the sales tax on textbooks for our students and that tax break goes to the forgotten middle class students. We do everything for the poor and that's good, but really nothing for the middle class and so this was for them."

He went on then to discuss the grave problem of cancer. He said he was spurred on by his next door neighbor who died of ovarian cancer. He said that she told him the day you discover you have cancer is the "loneliest" day of your life. Your doctor becomes your enemy, because he gave you the bad news. You do nothing but worry about your family and what will happen to them and your friends and neighbors can't possibly know what you are going through because they don't have the disease you have.

His neighbor said that you need to bring people together that are afflicted with this disease, so they can look one another in the eye and say, "it's going to be okay." He said his neighbor also said that breast cancer was very important, but you have to expand the discussion. It's not just breast cancer, but its also ovarian cancer, uterine cancer and prostate cancer and there is a very high incidence on Long Island.

Senator Balboni said, "Through a Senate initiative that I sponsored, we held the first, ever, Long Island symposium on cancer at Adelphi. Three hundred men and women showed up and we were able to bring together the leading edge physicians on cancer to talk about what is going on and what treatments work and what don't work. It was one of the best things I have been able to do in the Senate."

He continued, "Another thing we were able to do is commit $1 million dollars for cancer mapping. Now we are going to find out not just who is sick from cancer, but how did they get sick? Did they just move in or have they lived there for 25 years? Do they have someone in the family who has cancer, or is this a new situation? Do they live next to a power line? Do they live next to a parkway? Do they live next to a town dump? In other words, what are some of the environmental factors that are in the whole process of developing cancer, so we can begin to find out what is the cause."

He said, "We've done a lot of studies with the pesticides, but the problem is that we are assuming that pesticides are killing us and it may not be. Maybe its a combination of a lot of things."

"Further, this year we were able to restore $2 million dollars in funding to the Nassau County Poison Control Centers. The center, based in Mineola, services 32,000 phone calls a year, mostly from scared and terrified parents and grandparents and due to the restoration of funds, the center is up and running again, " added Balboni.

Senator Balboni also came with 100 STAR applications and as a testimony to that program one senior announced that she just received her school taxes and it was zero. Senator Balboni commented that the program is really working and is being almost entirely funded by the funds from the New York State Lotto program.

Senator Balboni completed his talk by urging all the seniors to keep in touch with him and if they have any ideas for improvement in the state to please get in touch with him at his Mineola office at 873-0736.