A private senior care facility in the Bahamas is grappling with severe financial strain after accumulating more than $200,000 in unpaid accommodation fees, with a significant number of these debts linked to family members who collect their elderly relatives’ National Insurance Board (NIB) benefits but fail to pass the funds on to the facility.
Patricia Moxey, owner and operator of Pat’s Senior Citizens Home, is publicly appealing to indebted families to settle their long-overdue accounts, highlighting how the ongoing unpaid balances are crippling the facility’s ability to deliver high-quality care to its more than 40 residents. In an interview yesterday, Moxey explained that many families allow bills to accumulate for years, often making empty promises to resolve the debt after a resident passes away.
“They let the bill run up, and if the person happens to pass away they say ‘oh after the funeral I’ll sort you out,” Moxey said. “But you’ll never hear from them again.”
Moxey noted that roughly 15 percent of the facility’s residents have family members that have stopped paying care fees. Many of these residents are in fragile health — some are bedridden, others live with diabetes, and many lack the cognitive ability to understand that their families are no longer covering their care costs. In a number of cases, Moxey claims families have secretly moved their relatives to the gerontology ward at Sandilands Rehabilitation Centre specifically to avoid paying what they owe.
Complicating the issue, many residents have authorized their NIB benefits to be deposited directly into joint or family-owned bank accounts, meaning the facility never sees a cent of the money meant to cover accommodation and care costs. Despite the mounting financial pressure, Moxey says she cannot bring herself to evict vulnerable elderly residents who have nowhere else to go.
“We can’t just take the people and throw them out,” she said. “I feel as if they’re doing this now then that means they can’t properly take care of their loved ones.”
Moxey’s revelation of widespread non-payment and potential financial exploitation comes just one week after Bahamian Parliament passed the landmark Older Persons Rights, Protection, Care and Support Bill of 2026, a piece of legislation crafted explicitly to address gaps in elder protection — including exactly the type of abuse Moxey describes.
The new law creates a legal duty for next of kin to ensure their elderly relatives maintain an adequate standard of living, covering access to safe housing, nutrition, clothing, medical care, and long-term or palliative support. Most critically, it codifies financial exploitation of elders as a specific criminal offense, covering the improper or dishonest use, control, or withholding of an older person’s money, property, pension, NIB benefits, or other assets.
Convictions for financial exploitation can carry penalties of up to a $50,000 fine, five years imprisonment, or both. The legislation explicitly lists collecting an older person’s benefits without using those funds for their care as a form of criminal exploitation, alongside other abuses such as unauthorized withdrawals, forgery, coercion around property transfers or will changes, and preventing elders from accessing their own funds.
Under the new law, authorities including police, the NIB, and other relevant government bodies gain the power to investigate suspected exploitation cases, and can compel individuals suspected of mismanaging an elder’s finances to produce receipts and financial records accounting for how funds were spent. The legislation also introduces new accountability requirements for anyone formally authorized to manage an elder’s affairs, requiring that such authorization be given voluntarily, in writing, free of coercion, and witnessed by an independent third party.
For facilities like Pat’s Senior Citizens Home, the new law offers a potential path forward to address the growing crisis of unpaid care costs and elder financial abuse, though Moxey’s plea makes clear that the burden of solving the immediate crisis still falls on the families who owe the facility money.