Apparently this is an egregious problem in Michigan too.
http://www.lansingstatejournal.com/story/news/local/2017/10/03/judge-requests-investigation-lansing-lawyer-conflicts-interest-judge-requests-investigation-lansing/712704001/
I do not doubt it. I could fill a book with the horrifying experiences we've encountered in caring for my grandparents over the years, many of those years in Michigan. My mother is my grandparents' only child and she lives back in Poland from whence they came, because Nazis.
In lieu of memoir I will list some highlights:
A hospital in Michigan sent my grandfather to a nursing home via ambulance, without any permission from ANYONE, dying grandfather or living spouse included. They sent him there in nothing more than a hospital gown, with electrodes and crap still stuck on his chest. The clothes and personal effects from his arrival at the hospital? Who the hell knows?
We physically removed him from the nursing home the same day, as in, I did not ask anybody anything and just hired a personal ambulance and wheeled him out myself, once we FOUND OUT WHERE HE WAS, which was NOT easy. The hospital literally would not tell my grandmother where her husband was. I thought the experience would be the end of both of them.
More recently, my grandmother lay in another Michigan hospital for four days, in agony, with no more than Tylenol 3 once per day and NO diagnosis. Despite this total lack of comprehension about a marked change in her condition, we were told it was "time for her to go to a nursing home."
I had to physically put myself between my grandmother and the social worker and guardian type person (as in, stand between them and her bed, arms outstretched), and I have full POA. I was at the hospital for 14-20 hours/day for seven consecutive days because I knew that, the minute I left, the guardian would swoop in and they'd probably do what they did to my grandfather.
Grandma now lives in California with me and is doing marvelously, walking all over and pain free.
We don't have children and won't, and after these experiences I have cold, pure terror of aging in this country. But, I also know that most of the people in hospitals and nursing homes did have kids, and you don't necessarily see much of them.