On Friday, May 21, 2021, The Acting US Attorney for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania announced a settlement in a case that alleged that an Atlanta, GA based chain Sava SeniorCare that owns more than 160 facilities across the country violated the False Claims Act by billing Medicare for rehab services that were not reasonable, necessary, or skilled. Was this…
The California Department of Justice and the district attorneys of four counties, LA, Santa Cruz, Marin, and Alameda, filed suit last week against a company called Mariner Health Care Services, alleging that the company ‘siphoned off funds necessary for appropriate staffing,’ while accusing it of ‘trading people for profits at every turn.’ Identifying and weeding out the bad apples is…
The Coronavirus epidemic has wrought a reckoning to thousands of US Nursing Homes exposed for their poor infection control protocols, inadequate staffing, and lack of personal protective equipment (PPE). At last count, more than 182,000 Coronavirus deaths and 1.4 million infections in the US are linked to nursing homes. In eight states, at least half of Covid deaths are linked…
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...