How Texas’s “Light-Touch” Experiment Failed Our Elderly and Disabled
By Michael Phillips | Texas Bay News
If you locked your elderly neighbor in a house, pumped them full of drugs they weren’t prescribed, took control of their bank account, and left them to sit in their own waste, you’d be in handcuffs before the sun went down.
Inside Texas’s “boarding home” system, people have done all of that—and for years, the state barely lifted a finger.
In just one metro area, police have tied a single unlicensed operator to roughly 20 deaths in about two years. That’s more than the total number of homicides some rural Texas counties see in the same time span. This isn’t a zoning dispute. It’s a quiet mass-casualty scandal.
A deep investigation by In These Times and Type Investigations—republished by the Texas Observer—documents dozens of preventable deaths, heavy chemical sedation, financial exploitation, and outright murder inside Texas’s shadowy network of unlicensed “boarding homes.”
One operator alone—Regla “Su” Becquer of Love and Caring for People LLC—has been linked to around 20 resident deaths in the Arlington area since 2022. She now faces a murder charge in the death of Steven Pankratz, who was allegedly drugged with unprescribed antipsychotics and left to deteriorate in a house he was discharged to straight from the hospital.
For Texans who believe in limited government, law-and-order, and fiscal responsibility, this should be a five-alarm fire. What’s happening here is not conservatism. It’s negligence wearing a small-government mask.
What Boarding Homes Are Supposed to Be—And What They’ve Become
On paper, “boarding homes” in Texas are simple: low-cost shared housing for adults who can mostly care for themselves. They’re supposed to provide meals, a roof, maybe some rides and reminders—not hands-on nursing.
In reality, thousands of these homes now function as de facto nursing facilities for people who are too poor for private care and often too sick or disabled to live alone:
- They typically charge about $1,200–$1,800 per month, compared to roughly $5,500–$8,000 per month for nursing homes.
- Many operate totally outside the state’s licensing system—no routine inspections, no training standards, no real limits on how many medically fragile residents they accept.
- Hospitals and rehab centers, facing bed shortages and discharge pressure, routinely dump patients needing 24-hour care into these unregulated homes because there is nowhere else to go.
And why is there nowhere else to go? Because for years we’ve run a high-wire act:
- Texas has the highest uninsured rate in the nation and has not expanded Medicaid, leaving huge gaps in long-term care.
- At least 84 nursing homes have closed in Texas over the last five years, taking more than 3,200 Medicaid beds with them.
When the music stopped, the people left standing weren’t bureaucrats or lobbyists. They were the elderly, the disabled, the mentally ill, and—in too many cases—the dead.
Inside the “Love and Caring” Death Houses
The Regla Becquer case shows just how far the system has fallen.
According to police, prosecutors, and court documents, survivors and families describe a pattern in her Arlington-area homes:
- Residents locked inside, unable to freely leave.
- People sedated with powerful psych drugs doctors never prescribed for them.
- Food and water withheld or tightly controlled.
- People sitting for hours or days in soiled diapers.
- Wheelchairs and walkers taken away to keep residents from moving.
- Families blocked from contact or lied to about conditions.
On top of the physical abuse and neglect, there’s evidence of systemic financial exploitation:
- Residents were allegedly pushed to sign powers of attorney, wills, and real estate transfers naming Becquer or her associates as beneficiaries.
- Vehicles and homes were quietly transferred shortly before or after deaths.
- Families discovered “last-minute” one-sentence wills leaving entire estates to the operator and are now challenging them in court.
This isn’t just “bad paperwork” or a few code violations missed by sleepy inspectors. These are the hallmarks of a criminal enterprise—one that flourished because the state built a regulatory maze full of loopholes and then never bothered to patrol it.
How Did Texas Let This Happen?
A few key policy decisions—and non-decisions—opened the door.
1. A Patchwork with Big, Deadly Holes
Texas doesn’t have one statewide system for boarding homes. Instead, it lets cities and counties decide whether to regulate at all.
Many simply didn’t.
For years, Arlington—ground zero for the Becquer case—had no boarding-home ordinance. No permits, no inspections, no background checks, no real enforcement tools. Operators could stuff vulnerable residents into ordinary houses and operate in the shadows until a reporter or a homicide detective stumbled across them.
Even now, operators can flee from a city that tightens its rules into neighboring jurisdictions that still look the other way.
2. Weak Penalties, Weaker Enforcement
Until very recently, Texas treated unlicensed personal-care operations like a minor nuisance.
- Providing “personal care services” (bathing, feeding, managing medications) without the proper license was only a Class B misdemeanor—the kind of charge that often ends in a small fine or probation.
- Operating a boarding home without local permits is a crime only where local governments have chosen to regulate, and enforcement has been sporadic at best.
The Legislature upgraded illegal personal care to a Class A misdemeanor and passed new rules aimed at bad placement agencies. Those are welcome changes—but they arrive after people have already died, and they still depend on local officials who may or may not take this seriously.
3. Referral Money with Almost No Accountability
For years, “senior housing consultants” and placement agencies could:
- Collect referral fees from operators,
- Steer residents to homes with long complaint histories, and
- Face almost no legal consequences when things went wrong.
New rules now bar them from knowingly placing people in unlicensed homes in regulated areas and require them to disclose complaint histories. That’s progress. But it doesn’t touch the deeper problem: there’s still no clear, public way for families to see where the bodies are buried—literally and figuratively.
What a Real Conservative Response Should Look Like
The left’s answer to all this is predictable: more spending, more bureaucracy, more power centralized in Austin and Washington.
But “do nothing” is not an option, and “deregulate harder” is not a serious response when people are dying.
A genuinely conservative answer should be simple: protect the vulnerable, punish the predators, and fix the system with targeted, local, and transparent tools—not a new army of state regulators.
Here’s what that could look like.
1. Treat This Like Organized Crime
Let’s be blunt: a multi-house operation that hoovers up Social Security checks, real estate, and life-insurance payouts while people die under suspicious circumstances doesn’t look like “a small business.” It looks like a criminal racket.
Conservatives should be calling for:
- The Attorney General’s Organized Crime Division to get explicit jurisdiction and funding to pursue boarding-home networks using state RICO-style statutes.
- Multi-house, multi-victim cases to be treated like other major fraud and abuse rings—complete with asset seizure, restitution to families, and long prison terms.
- A publicly reported “worst of the worst” enforcement list so Texans can see that predators are actually being taken off the board.
One well-publicized takedown of a 10–20 home network would send a message that no amount of legal fine print will protect operators who prey on our elderly and disabled.
2. Draw a Bright Line: If You’re Doing Nursing Work, You’re in a Regulated Business
Texas doesn’t need to copy California’s bureaucracy. But it does need a clear rule:
If you are feeding, bathing, dressing, medicating, or physically restraining people who can’t care for themselves,
you are in a health-care business—period.
That should trigger:
- Mandatory registration with the state or county.
- Basic safety standards: occupancy limits, fire safety, training for caregivers, emergency procedures.
- Regular inspections—lightweight for small, good operators; more intensive for large or higher-risk homes.
At the same time, Texas should create a fast lane for:
- Small, family-run, and faith-based homes that already provide good care and just need a streamlined way to get recognized and stay compliant without wading through 500 pages of regulations.
This is targeted regulation, not blanket central planning: protect basic human safety, then get out of the way.
3. Follow the Money: Shut Down Referral and Benefit Grifts
If we want government to spend less and do better, we have to choke off the scams that feast on taxpayer-funded benefits.
Texas should:
- Build a public registry of boarding homes and group homes—licensed or not—listing addresses, owners, inspection results, substantiated complaints, and links to criminal cases. If a placement agency sends someone to a home with a rap sheet, everyone should know it.
- Require extra scrutiny for representative payees (people who control multiple residents’ Social Security checks). High-risk patterns—like one operator controlling dozens of benefits—should trigger automatic review.
- Use existing fraud, forgery, and money-laundering laws aggressively when operators use wills, deeds, and POAs to strip residents of assets.
Conservatives are right to complain about fraud in welfare and disability programs. Here is one place where those complaints are obviously justified—and fixable.
4. Local Control with a Real Floor, Not a Fake One
“Local control” can’t just mean “local officials are free to ignore a crisis forever.”
The state’s job is to set a minimum floor; local governments build on it.
Texas should:
- Require every county that permits boarding homes to adopt at least a basic ordinance: registration, background checks, occupancy limits, and fire/sanitation standards.
- Tie state abuse and fraud penalties to actual local enforcement. If a jurisdiction refuses to enforce even minimal safety rules, the state should be able to step in.
- Encourage counties to experiment—some will go lean and focused, others more robust. Then Texans can compare outcomes and push for what works.
That’s true localism: competition and accountability, not a patchwork of blind spots.
5. Support Alternatives Without Handing the Keys to Washington
Yes, part of this crisis comes from a shortage of nursing-home beds and home-care options. But the only answer cannot be “expand Medicaid, take more federal dollars, and hope D.C. saves us.”
Conservatives should champion parallel, non-bureaucratic solutions:
- Tax incentives for long-term-care insurance and family caregiving, so more people can avoid the system entirely.
- Targeted support for church-run and nonprofit homes that meet transparent safety and quality benchmarks.
- Reprioritizing existing Medicaid and state dollars toward home- and community-based services that keep people out of both nursing homes and predatory boarding homes.
We don’t have to choose between lethal neglect and federal dependency. There is a better, Texas-shaped middle ground.
What Concerned Texans Can Do Now
You don’t have to be a lawyer or legislator to make a difference.
- Watch your neighborhood. If you see a house with a rotating cast of obviously disabled or elderly residents and unusual traffic, don’t ignore it.
- Speak up. If you suspect abuse or neglect, report it to local law enforcement and Adult Protective Services. Push until you get a real answer.
- Press your local officials. Ask your city council, county commissioners, and state reps:
- How many boarding homes are in our jurisdiction?
- Are they registered and inspected?
- How many have been shut down or prosecuted in the last two years?
- Vote like this matters. Support sheriffs, district attorneys, and judges who treat elder and disability abuse as the serious crime it is—not as “code enforcement.”
When “Limited Government” Becomes Lethal
Texas has long sold itself as the state where government is small, freedom is big, and people take care of their own.
But when we allow operators to drug, cage, and strip-mine the elderly and disabled in the name of “light-touch regulation,” we’re not defending freedom. We’re abandoning responsibility.
True conservatism doesn’t look away from the weakest members of our communities. It insists that:
- Predators go to prison,
- The vulnerable are protected, and
- Government is limited—but never absent.
The boarding home scandal is more than a horror story. It’s a test of whether our principles mean anything when it’s no longer just about tax rates and talking points—but about who lives, who dies, and what we’re willing to tolerate behind closed doors.
Texas Bay News 
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