Fighting For The Elderly, Vulnerable and Injured.
All nursing homes are not the same, especially when it comes to infection control and keeping residents safe from deadly viruses. If there is any silver lining in the pandemic, it is that the virus plainly exposed the poorly managed facilities. Nursing homes that had rigorous protocols in place and which followed the letter of the law have come through…
Driving a car without a license in California can get you arrested and fined but running a nursing home without a license turns out to have surprisingly little impact on the for-profit chains flouting the law. Data from the California Department of Public Health show that between 2015 and 2020, 250 applications were submitted to change ownership of California’s 1200…
A medical license is a highly prestigious credential signaling that the holder has completed rigorous training and has been approved by his or her peers as having the skills, knowledge, and experience to provide medical care. Physicians as a group are among the highest income earners in the United States, a fact with which hardly anyone would take issue. Doctors…
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 they did not need. The operations manager at Merida Group, a chain of…
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 lead-author Cinnamon St. John. Among the findings in the report were: Residents in…
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 late in reacting to an unfolding crisis. Why are we finding difficult to find politicians…
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 of that statement sink in for a moment. The CEO of the facility, Foss…
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 weeks later, in a park, under his wheelchair, unconscious. · A 59-year-old male resident with mental…
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 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...