Nursing homes Category Archives — DC Medical Malpractice & Patient Safety Blog Published by Washington, D.C. Personal Injury Lawyers

December 7, 2022

In nursing homes and hospices, too little oversight, too much profiteering

What happens when the highly vulnerable — older, sick, injured, and debilitated people — get left in the hands of profit-obsessed private enterprises operating under woefully lax regulatory oversight? Big messes abound, as news organizations have reported after taking deep dives into the workings of the “hustle” of for-profit hospice programs, or the chronic staffing shortages that prevail at far too many private nursing homes.

Sure, this is a hectic time of the year, and it can be a challenge to carve out the time to pore over the painstaking reporting of fine journalists who race to make public their major investigations before the year’s end (including to qualify for major professional prizes).

Still, for anyone concerned about destructive failures in the U.S. health care system, how they blow up over time, and how they get ignored until they become crises, the reports by ProPublica, the New Yorker, and USA Today are important reading.

November 23, 2022

Nursing homes reckon with big suits and prospect of tough staffing rules

by Patrick A. Malone

The Biden Administration is encountering stiff industry opposition but is forging ahead with plans to announce in coming months major regulatory reforms that advocates hope finally will force nursing homes to meet minimum staffing guidelines to care for some of the nation’s most vulnerable.

The tragic devastation of long-term care facilities and their residents by the coronavirus pandemic demonstrated the dire need for federal regulators to set baseline standards for nursing and other front-line resident care, critics say.

Their arguments have been bolstered by lawsuits against nursing homes and their subsequent disclosure of harms done to seniors, the sick, and injured — those who are so debilitated that they require substantial living assistance but too often do not get it due to substandard staffing and profit-driven decision-making by facilities’ owners and operators.

September 18, 2022

Two U.S. regulatory agencies rip nursing homes for sketchy debt collection

by Patrick A. Malone

Two federal regulatory agencies have rebuked nursing homes and their debt collectors, warning them that they may be breaking the law with sketchy efforts to make loved ones and friends pay for the care of sick, injured, and debilitated residents in long-term facilities.

Bottom line: A lot of the forms that you may sign for a loved one as they are admitted to a nursing home are straight-up illegal if they purport to make you responsible for paying the facility’s bills.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) has conducted hearings and issued a report as well as putting out a joint letter with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), the agency with oversight of nursing homes and other long-term care facilities.

August 2, 2022

When admitting a loved one to a nursing home, be sure to read what you sign (because you could be sued later)

by Patrick A. Malone

When seniors need full-time institutional care, or when the injured or debilitated require similar 24/7 attention, loved ones — and even friends — must take care to read and re-read any documents that nursing homes and other long-term care facilities shove before them to sign during the stressful admissions process.

That’s because the owners and operators of the facilities soon may create a financial nightmare for the unwitting document signers, fueling what is the huge shame of the U.S. health care system: medical debt.

Most regular folks might think that the financial obligations incurred in long-term care facilities rightly belong to the adult residents. They’re 21 and older, and unlike minor kids carted into urgent, or emergency rooms for treatment, the residents typically have, until their situations suddenly shift, been responsible, including legally, for their lives and personal business.

April 19, 2022

U.S. economy really feeling financial crunch of caregivers staying home

by Patrick A. Malone

A glaring gap in the U.S. health care system — the giving of care at home — is burgeoning into a costly chasm. Pretty much everybody involved needs to pay close attention and finally act to deal with the nation’s failure to support home caregiving for the sick, injured, debilitated, and aged.

The consequences of inaction already are becoming clear, as the dearth of home care is smacking the recovering economy, “contributing to labor shortages around the country and playing a role in overall inflation,” the Washington Post reported, finding:

“At least 6.6 million people who weren’t working in early March said it was because they were caring for someone else, according to the most recent Household Pulse Survey from the Census Bureau. Whether — and when — they return to work will play a role in the continued recovery and could reshape the post-Covid labor force. For all the attention on parents — and mothers in particular — who stopped working to care for children during the pandemic, four times as many people are out of the work force, caring for spouses, siblings, aging parents, and grandchildren, according to the Federal Reserve’s latest Monetary Policy Report.

April 15, 2022

Nursing homes in desperate need of giant overhaul, experts say

by Patrick A. Malone

The nation’s nursing homes and other long-term care facilities are in dire need of drastic overhaul to dramatically improve the quality and safety of their treatment of the aged, sick, and disabled. They too often now get what one expert has described as “ineffective, inefficient, inequitable, fragmented, and unsustainable” care.

To repair the glaring, longstanding wrongs in these facilities — problems that critics say contributed to 150,000 resident deaths during the coronavirus pandemic — requires sweeping practical, regulatory, and financial changes in an industry focused on profits and resistant to change, according to newly published expert research report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

The academies, with members who are leaders in their fields, are private, nonprofit institutions that work outside of government to provide objective advice on matters of science, technology, and health.

March 6, 2022

U.S. announces crackdown on poor quality and safety in nursing home care

by Patrick A. Malone

The Biden Administration has put the owners and operators of nursing homes and other long-term care facilities on notice that they must make major, desperately needed changes in the way they operate and that they will face much more and tougher oversight by federal regulators.

These reforms — prompted by the coronavirus pandemic and the 200,000 estimated deaths in long-term care facilities of elderly, ailing, and disabled residents — will not occur overnight and already are getting big push back from the industry. Still, as Biden pledged in his State of the Union remarks:

“Tonight, I’m announcing a crackdown on … companies overcharging American businesses and consumers. And as Wall Street firms take over more nursing homes, quality in those homes has gone down and costs have gone up. That ends on my watch. Medicare is going to set higher standards for nursing homes and make sure your loved ones get the care they deserve and expect.”

February 20, 2022

Health workers hit deadline for coronavirus shots. Where’s the fuss now?

by Patrick A. Malone

A proverbial tree fell in a forest — and did anyone hear it? The Biden Administration’s deadline came and went for health workers across the country to get vaccinated against the coronavirus or their employers might lose vital federal funding. And despite the political drama that engulfed that requirement, it apparently took force minus the dire consequences opponents predicted.

Due to legal challenges to the vaccination requirement — arguments that the U.S. Supreme Court eventually rejected — the rollout of the mandate was staggered and varied by state.

It will be up to individual institutions and those states to report the data on who complied, with potential loss of Medicare, Medicaid, and other federal funds for those who did not.

January 26, 2022

Financial tangles can trap poorer residents in costly nursing homes

by Patrick A. Malone

As experts drill down to discover why nursing homes and other long-term care facilities are not playing a vital role in the U.S. health system by admitting improving patients from costly care in overwhelmed hospitals, a disconcerting explanation is emerging on who is filling some of the invaluable institutional space.

They might be called system hostages of sorts, poorer residents of nursing homes and other facilities whose condition has gotten better but who are trapped in institutions for distinct reasons, including the grim reality that they owe money they cannot pay, according to Jesse Bedayn of the nonprofit news site CalMatters. As he reported of the situation in the Golden State and nationally:

“While elder care advocates sound the alarm about patient ‘dumping’ by some California nursing homes — kicking out their mentally ill or bereft patients who need stable housing and care — a parallel dilemma is also threatening vulnerable residents: how to get out of a nursing home. The vast majority of people admitted to California skilled nursing facilities stay for less than three months to rehabilitate a broken limb or recover from a stroke or other ailment, according to the California Association of Health Facilities, an industry trade group. After these short-term stays, residents typically return home. But for thousands of poor nursing home residents … a temporary stay can become indefinite. Saddled with hefty Medicare copayments that can reach $5,000 a month — and later stripped of Social Security income, diverted to pay ongoing nursing home costs — they are often unable to hang onto their former housing. They become effectively stranded, with Medi-Cal and Social Security paying for housing and daily living in the facility.”

January 16, 2022

Vaccine mandate upheld for health workers but not large companies

by Patrick A. Malone

What is good for geese is not for ganders, the U.S. Supreme Court has decided.

The justices ruled 5-4 that the Biden Administration may force health employers to require their staff to get vaccinated or lose important federal funds, but in a 6-3 vote they rejected a vaccine-or-test mandate for companies with more than 100 employees for their workers in close contact with others.

The high court majority, assailed by dissenting justices, sided with conservative Republican state officials’ legal challenges and ripped away an important, proven way to quell the worst public health crisis in a century — a pandemic that is slamming the U.S. health system and is on its way to killing at least 850,000 Americans and infecting more than 65 million of us in recent months.