Articles Tagged with nursing home abuse

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There are currently nearly 1.5 million residents in nursing homes across the country. Now, with the passage of new federal rules – the most expansive update in a quarter century – those residents will have more involvement in their own care. 

The new regulations were first proposed in 2015 by Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell, who advocated for a shift toward care that is “person-centered.” That includes efforts to:

  • Hasten the development of care plans;
  • Allow greater variety and flexibility in snacks and meals;
  • Improved review of residents’ drug intake;
  • Heightened security;
  • Streamlined procedures for grievances;
  • Careful review of discharges that are involuntary.

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The children of the elderly woman pleaded with hospital staffers to save their mother, who was suffering from bedsores and pneumonia. The staffers had the resources. They had the tools and the equipment. What they didn’t have, they say, was permission. The woman had previously signed a do-not-resuscitate order. However, her children say the elderly woman lacked the mental capacity to sign such an order – something they tried in vain to argue with the staff as their mother was fighting for her life. She died in that hospital bed of her ailments in 2012. She was 67.

Now, Courtroom View Network is covering the developments of the civil lawsuit filed in Texas by her children who alleged medical malpractice against the hospital, the nursing home where she lived for years, the doctor for the nursing home and the physician’s assistant there. There were five opening statements from the defense side – one for each of the five defendants, who are individually represented.

Plaintiffs’ attorney posited to jurors during opening statements that decedent died of pneumonia which was the result of bedsores which were the direct result of nursing home negligence. Further, plaintiff lawyer accused the nursing home of wrongly allowing patient to sign a “do not resuscitate” (DNR) order, and also of allowing a neighbor to have medical power of attorney – even though at that time, she suffered signs of severe mental illness.  Continue reading →

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A state health department has cited seven nursing homes in connection with reports that residents were verbally abused by staffers. The state Department of Public Health in Connecticut cited the nursing homes more than $1,000 each in connection with the incidents. 

In one case, a registered nurse overheard an aide swearing and being disrespectful to the patient. However, it was not reported at the time. The aide was later fired.

In a similar case out of that same state two years ago, six nursing homes were fined by regulators in connection with cases of verbal abuse in nursing homes. In one of those cases, a nursing aide who was assisting a resident in using the toilet swore at the resident, prompting the resident to grab the aide’s shirt and yell. The aide then allegedly pushed the resident down, causing the resident to strike his head on the toilet paper dispenser and land on the wheelchair. The incident wasn’t reported for three whole days.  Continue reading →

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A national nursing home chain with dozens of locations in Florida (including in Orlando) has agreed to pay $145 million to resolve a government lawsuit alleging the company violated the federal False Claims Act by intentionally causing its facilities to submit claims to Medicare and Tricare for rehab services that were not:

  • Reasonable;
  • Skilled;
  • Necessary. 

The chain, Life Care Centers of America, Inc. is based in Tennessee and owns/ operates more than 220 nursing homes across the U.S. Its Florida facilities are listed here. Cases like this matter to patients not just because they involve defrauding taxpayers of federal money, but because vulnerable, elderly residents often end up receiving therapy they do not need and that, in some cases, is harmful.

This $145 million settlement is the largest the U.S. Department of Justice has ever made with a skilled nursing home facility, according to a recent press release.  Continue reading →

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Following the enactment of a new federal rule that prohibits the enforcement of arbitration agreements by nursing homes that accept federal funding (virtually all of them), a group of nursing home operators and industry trade groups are challenging the rule. Interestingly, they are doing so through the very avenue of recourse they are seeking to deny nursing home abuse and neglect victims: A lawsuit. 

In case you aren’t familiar with arbitration, it is procedure whereby legal disagreements and disputes are resolved by an arbitrator rather than a judge. The process is often secretive and arbitrators, rewarded handsomely with contracts from large nursing home corporations, often decide cases in favor of the companies. Even when the terms are more or less favorable to the plaintiff, damages awarded are often a fraction of what they would be had the matter been resolved in court. Arbitration agreements are binding contracts that patients and family members enter into by signing documents often buried in nursing home admission paperwork.

The lawsuit, American Health Care Assn. et al v. Burwell et al, was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Mississippi, Oxford Division. The lawsuit, which names the Secretary of Health and Human Services and the acting administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), labels the arbitration clause ban as capricious and arbitrary. The measure also contests the authority of CMS to act as a regulatory agency calling the shots on how nursing homes handle disputes. Plaintiffs in the litigation are asking the federal court to, at the very least, delay the enactment of the ban (the rest of the rule solidifies as law this month) while the court weighs the challenge by the industry group.  Continue reading →

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A wealthy nursing home operator with mansions in Miami and Los Angeles is the subject of a U.S. Justice Department investigation and prosecution that alleges he orchestrated a Medicare and Medicaid bribery and kickback scheme totaling losses of more than $1 billion. Authorities in July stated it was the largest single criminal health care fraud case ever filed against an individual by the DOJ. 

Now, the subject of that investigation, Philip Esformes, is fighting to be released on bond, as federal authorities are placing enormous pressure on the courts to keep him locked up in South Florida, where he was arrested at one of his Miami Beach waterfront estates this summer. Although the court has been bombarded with letters of support for Esformes, some of which have included receipts related to his many philanthropic efforts, he remains at the Miami Federal Detention Center.

Authorities say Esformes and his father siphoned millions of taxpayer dollars every single year from federal programs intended to aid the sick and disabled over the course of 14 years. The pair had nursing homes across the country, including about 20 in Florida. According to the latest federal indictment, he and his co-conspirators took money from these federal programs in the name of some 14,000 patients at various facilities. In many cases, federal authorities allege, patients were given treatment that wasn’t necessary and in some cases was actually harmful. Continue reading →

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An elaborate network of Florida nursing facilities reportedly were successful in scamming Medicare and Medicaid programs out of $1 billion over the last 14 years. 

According to The New York Times, the case involves bribes to doctors in Miami, hush money paid to witnesses and gigantic sums paid to shell companies. The Medicare black market has reportedly ballooned in the last 10 years, creating an atmosphere in which nursing home residents were put at great risk by the fact that they were often shoved in and out of the system when it often wasn’t necessary and getting services they often did not need.

The Times reported that doctors, pharmacists and medical personnel got kickbacks and billed Medicaid and Medicare for expensive drugs, procedures and health equipment that patients either didn’t receive or didn’t need.  Continue reading →

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Despite forceful calls by House Democrats and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s (CFPB) for a ban on mandatory nursing home arbitration agreements earlier this year, the new proposed rule by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) doesn’t contain any such provision.

The agency has toyed with requiring such a measure in the past, but it’s most recent proposed rule, while acknowledging “concerns” about forced arbitration, doesn’t go so far as to ban it.

This move was sharply criticized by The New York Times’ Editorial Board in an opinion titled, “Nursing Home Residents Still Vulnerable to Abuse.” Continue reading →

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We all know nursing home abuse is far too common in elder care facilities across the U.S. But a new study suggests it’s not only the staffers that residents and their families have to fear. 

Reuters reports that researchers with Weill Cornell Medicine revealed the startling commonality of resident-on-resident nursing home abuse.

Of the 2,011 nursing home residents they tracked, 407 had been involved in at least one incident of abuse that involved another resident over the course of four weeks. That’s right, in just one month, 1 in every 5 residents suffered a resident-on-resident abuse incident.

Many of these cases involved verbal taunts, which were to blame in nearly half of the reported cases. However, physical assaults comprised 26 percent of the reported incidents. What’s more, these were only the incidents that were reported to researchers. There may be many more about which we do not know. Continue reading →

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Courts generally enforce the strong federal policy that favors arbitration where such an agreement exists. However, that doesn’t mean a court will automatically dismiss a case that involves an arbitration clause in favor of that alternative dispute resolution. This is increasingly true in nursing home abuse cases, in which Florida judges are carefully scrutinizing arbitration clauses. 

One of the elements they consider is whether the party has relinquished rights to arbitrate.

This was the issue in the recent case of Johnson v. Heritage Healthcare, before the South Carolina Supreme Court. Court records show decedent, within six months of being admitted as a patient at defendant nursing home facility, she suffered severe pressure ulcers and a leg amputation that ultimately led to her death. The legal process to hold the facility accountable has been an arduous one, and like so many nursing home abuse cases, involved an arbitration agreement. The question before the state supreme court was whether defendant waived its right to arbitrate.  Continue reading →

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