Another Elder Financial Fraud Perpetrator Brought to Justice Stories of financial crimes against the elderly continue to pile up. Yesterday, the United States Justice Department announced that a man from Texas was sentenced to 27 months in prison for conspiring to falsely persuade thousands of patients with incurable diseases to enroll in a hospice program…
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Why For-Profit Nursing Homes Are A Bad Deal On February 18, 2021, a consumer group, The Center for Medicare Advocacy, published a report which looked at rates of COVID-19 infection in nursing homes. The study compared for-profit to nonprofit facilities and concluded the following: “For-profits were the worst performers across every CMS rating pool,” said…
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Finally, A Politician Who Gets It and Supports Nursing Homes Wouldn’t it be great if our elected officials were proactive in helping to solve some of the seemingly intractable problems faced by millions of Americans? When it comes to nursing homes, it’s clear that the vast majority of politicians are reactive, and worse still, seriously…
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Horrific Nursing Home Assault Results in $8 Million Settlement Last month, a Seattle nursing home’s insurance company agreed to pay $8 Million to settle a lawsuit brought by a woman in her 50s with multiple sclerosis who was sexually assaulted in her nursing home room by a male employee of the home. Let the horror…
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Death and Neglect Inside a So. Cal. Nursing Home Chain What do the following four incidents all have in common? · A CNA at a nursing home was charged with raping a mentally ill patient. · An elderly resident developed a gruesome bedsore. · A schizophrenic patient with one leg was discharged from a facility and found several…
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Elder Financial Abuse in Nursing Homes You might hope and expect that skilled nursing facilities would do everything possible to safeguard residents, not just physically and emotionally but also financially. Such is not the case. Last Friday, the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the District of Columbia announced a criminal complaint against a business office coordinator…
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Drugs Are Making Seniors Fall Down and Die A study published last month in Pharmacoepidemiology & Drug Safety (PDS) reports that in a study of more than 370,000 deaths between 1999 and 2017, the use of fall-risk increasing drugs, and deaths due to falls, are on the rise. Furthermore, the percent of people receiving at…
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‘I Care A Lot’ In Real Life The recent movie on Netflix, I Care A Lot, features the actress Alicia Witt playing the corrupt Dr. Karen Amos, who finds unsuspecting patients and connects them to a crooked legal guardian named Marla Grayson, played by Rosamund Pike. Marla compensates Karen with stock options for her part…
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Revisiting Visitation at Nursing Homes At last count, more than 172,000 have died, and 1.3 million residents and employees have been infected at 31,000 nursing home facilities across the United States, according to the New York Times. As much as the Coronavirus has decimated nursing home populations, another consequence of the virus is that families…
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The 5-Star Nursing Home Rating System Is A Farce It seemed like a good idea in December 2008 when the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services rolled out a 5-Star Quality Rating System to help consumers, families, and caregivers compare nursing homes more easily. By definition, a 5-star rating means that a facility ranks in…
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