NJ Advances Package to Combat Elder Abuse and it is all Fluff and Nonsense!

Dear Reader:

We have contended from the outset that the oversight agencies are ineffective, corrupt, complicit in or facilitators of abuse, neglect and exploitation. Full Stop. We have contended that many of the players within the elder-care guardianship and nursing home context are inextricably intertwined in wrongdoing, most with incestuous relationships with the oversight agencies. We have posited that there is no such thing as reporting if it is left to the good will of those entrusted with the care of the elderly. We maintain that too many people are making too much money for the nonsense legislation to have any substance.

Oversight agencies must be held accountable for their failures. Elder abuse MUST be accompanied by criminal penalties, whether to the guardians, the owners and operators, the magnates, the investors, the employees or the judges and politicians that allow the abuse to continue unchecked. Elder abuse MUST be deemed unacceptable. Full stop. Elders MUST have the power to decide their own destinies. Elders MUST be believed until their statements are proven unbelievable, if that is possible. An Elder’s human dignity MUST be respected before all else and not entrusted in the care of those who lack humanity and conscience.

New Jersey’s four-part legislation pays lipservice to intent but does none of that. It assumes unicorns and rainbows with respect to an industry which is no different that legalized human trafficking. When you build a beautiful house on a flawed foundation the house is doomed. So too is the fluff and nonsense legislation in New Jersey.

Assembly Panel Advances Murphy & Vainieri Huttle Bill Package to Combat Abuse, Neglect & Exploitation of Seniors and Vulnerable Adults

Assembly Panel Advances Murphy & Vainieri Huttle Bill Package to Combat Abuse, Neglect & Exploitation of Seniors and Vulnerable Adults

Measures to Modernize Conservatorships & Guardianships; Address Financial Abuse; and Strengthen Protections for Vulnerable Adults

(TRENTON) – The Assembly Aging and Senior Services Committee on Monday approved a package of four bills sponsored by Assembly Democrats Carol Murphy and Valerie Vainieri Huttle to protect elderly or vulnerable adults from facing abuse, neglect or exploitation.

About one in ten Americans over age 60 have experienced some form of elder abuse, including physical or emotional abuse or financial exploitation. Mental or physical impairments may make them more vulnerable to abuse, and many cases go unreported.

People with disabilities are also at a higher risk of abuse, neglect or exploitation. About 30 percent of individuals with disabilities who need assistance with daily care, maintaining their health and safety, and accessing their communities have experienced some form of mistreatment.

“As we age, many of us will need a support system to help manage our health, finances, transportation and other aspects of life. This is especially true for seniors with dementia or other cognitive impairments” said Murphy (D-Burlington). “Sadly, too often the person trusted with an elderly person’s care ends up taking advantage of them. We must ensure the people caring for our most vulnerable have their best interests at heart, and everyone knows how recognize and report elder abuse.”

“Every person deserves to age with dignity,” said Vainieri Huttle (D-Bergen). “We may face illness, disability or physical decline, but we should never face abuse. By strengthening protections for older adults and our most vulnerable, we are helping to keep our elderly loved ones safe and safeguard our own futures.”

Two bills in the package would modernize existing laws regarding conservatorship and guardianship in New Jersey. The first measure (A-4615) would require proposed conservatees or someone already under conservatorship to have counsel throughout the course of all court proceedings. The court would be required to appoint a counsel if they were ever unrepresented. The counsel would personally interview the conservatee or proposed conservatee within 72 hours before each scheduled hearing focused on conservatorship.

Counsel must also be provided to individuals under guardianships, or wards, as part of the second bill (A-4618).

Insider NJ

For-Profit Nursing Homes Should be de-Licensed- The Elderly Need Protection From Quantifiable Valuation Over Humanity!

Dear Reader:

We have been railing about for-profit nursing and rehabilitation facilities for years: when an elder care facility, any version of elder care, is for-profit, there is utter lawlessness. Money flows like water through a sieve, unencumbered by laws or oversight.

A thorough review of the names of for-profit nursing homes and rehabilitation facilities in New York, cross-checked with PPP Loans reveals that many of them (and/or their attorneys) were some of the largest recipients of PPP Loans during the first round of Covid relief. The second round remains to be seen. They will likely be the first to get PPP Loan forgiveness even though many of them did little, or more accurately nothing to protect their employees or their patients. In fact, the word “nothing” here is quite forgiving. It would mean a passive omission, simple apathy.

To put the narrative in a more truthful perspective, many of the for-profit nursing homes fed their own pockets with the Covid-19 funding. That money should have guaranteed staffing but they were underpaying wages or not hiring. And, many of the country’s nursing homes are owned by the same or similar groups of owners, and they actively manipulated and continue to manipulate the system to profit from Covid-19. Yes! To profit!

Many nursing homes (though not all) take out life insurance on their patients with them as beneficiaries of the policy, when the patient signs in. If that patients makes it past 30-days to 60-days depending upon the policy, the death of the patient generates income to the homes. It is a win/win. Well, the insurers are out – but there is little oversight there either. These are small money policies that generally are unregulated by the insurance industry.

LeadingAge, the “elder care facility advocacy group” believes that the failure of many of these homes cannot be fixed by oversight it can only be fixed by adding money. The comments by LeadingAge imply that there is not enough money to help these facilities take appropriate care of their patients. That is a vile and utterly false interpretation of events. The business model is profit above all else. A view from 30,000 feet shows his analysis doesn’t match the math with respect to many, if not all, of the for-profit elder care facilities.

The problem, in this blogger’s humble opinion: YOU CANNOT BUY MORALITY. IF YOU ARE LACKING IN A MORAL COMPASS, THERE IS NO AMOUNT OF MONEY IN THE WORLD THAT WILL FIX THAT. ADDITIONAL MONEY SIMPLY FEEDS THE MONSTER!

The nursing and rehabilitation home industry is a well-played, well-gamed and manipulated system run by super savvy individuals or groups who know how to game every aspect of the operation. Many are partially owned by the attorneys who represent them and some of those attorneys, at least in NY, help decide who runs on political tickets. These “moblike” industry is a web of somewhat incestuous industry connections. The Elder Care Centers will contract out linen and food services to friends, family or even themselves (a rose by any other name…). They buy drugs from distribution or drug companies owned or operated by their friends, colleagues or even their own corporate enterprises who provide a scratch on their proverbial backs. Foodservice is provided by friends, family or interrelated entities. Mobile medicine is provided by interrelated companies.

These facilities use inexpensive sharps for things like insulin and other injectable drugs that often result in more pain to the patient but less pain to the bottom line. Many reuse insulin or other injectable drug vials but charge each patient for their own, sometimes stockpiling the extra meds and sidestepping laws that prevent the reuse of needles or vials. Instead of giving their patients the name-brand drugs they may have used before admission to their facilities, they give them the generics and file claims for name-brand. They often fail to provide necessary services: occupational, speech, physical and other therapies, they claim to provide those services and bill for them; but many of the patients will attest to what they are not getting and therapy is on the top of that list. They charge for doctor’s visits that don’t happen or are substituted by RN’s, NP’s or PA’s so the doctors are often paid multiple times for the same hour in a day – a reward for often misdiagnosing ailments or over-diagnosing meds.

Facilities that have specialized Dialysis centers associated with their services have little reason to protect a diabetic’s kidneys when a slow destruction of the kidneys yields greater profit. Dialysis is far more profitable then kidney treatment and insulin.

These numbers can be obtained for the asking by law enforcement or anyone reading this blog. Nursing homes and rehabilitations centers need strict oversight absent loopholes. For-profit nursing homes need to be de-licensed – all of them. The ownership of the homes is available on public links. The links between owners in different states can be found by cross checking ownership state-by-state. We have done this analysis with respect to about 30 of the largest of the and most mafia-like ownership groups, which, by the way, own some of the country’s worst nursing homes. We are not stating anything that is not otherwise publicly available and we have been making these claims for years.

No one should be listening to the lobbyists. They have an agenda and quality care for elderly and vulnerable individuals is a far too altruistic endeavor. The lobbyists also have skin-in-the-game and it amounts to a fortune!

New York Assembly releases package of nursing home reform bills

The Democratic-led New York state Assembly released a package of nearly 20 nursing home accountability bills Friday, aimed at tightening restrictions on the hundreds of for-profit facilities.

Among the 19 bills is one sponsored by Assembly Health Chair Dick Gottfried (D-Manhattan) that would prohibit the creation of any new for-profit homes and impose a morratorium expanding the capacity of existing homes.

“Lots of people have been discovering that there are enormous problems in our nursing homes. COVID may have brought them to light and made them worse but a lot of us know those problems have been there for many, many, many years,” Gottfried said during Thursday’s remote Joint Legislative Budget Hearing on Health. 

He railed against the for-profit industry in an interview later Thursday evening with NY1, arguing those nursing homes often have higher infection rates and instances of bed sores among patients.

“We’re not going to license any more for-profit nursing homes or for-profit beds,” he said. “We should stop the creation of for-profit beds…you should [operate a nursing home] to care for people not because you want to make money.”

Right now, there are 401 for-profit, privately owned nursing homes out of the roughly 619 in the Empire State, according to a January report from the office of state Attorney General Letitia James.

To continue reading in The New York Post

Holding Up Stimulus for Inclusion of Granny Killer Immunity Provisions [VIDEO and Comments] Covid-19

 

Dear Reader:

The Covid-19 Immunity language acting as a blockade for the current US Stimulus package is language taken from New York’s Granny Killer Immunity provisions. These are legal provisions which shields nursing home owners, managers and investors and hospitals from liability as it relates to Covid-19. There can be nothing more unsettling from the perspective of the United States and its future  than understanding that the Granny Killer Immunity is broad, dynamic and shields even the most egregious behavior of those in charge of the healthcare of some of this country’s most vulnerable population, the elderly. We should all be in a state of outrage, except, of course, those who are profiting from this immunity.

We will not take the time to conduct a wide analysis regarding why the mostly the Republicans in Congress would be holding up stimulus on this issue, except to state that a review of the donors of many of these politicians is broadly entrenched in owners and investors within the healthcare industry. And the Granny Killer provisions that Mitch McConnell demands be included in the stimulus goes one step further to add factories and other industries, making them immune from putting people in danger.

This should be alarming to every US citizen, not just those who frequent this blog. We therefore ask that you kindly review the video and share this post as well as others related to “Granny Killer Immunity Provisions.” They are making investors very rich and tarnish the entire pharmaceutical and medical industry in the US, perhaps creating irreparable distrust.

Assembly Member Ron Kim’s Nursing Homes and Culpability Profit over Life – Covid-19, BUT it Doesn’t End There

 

Dear Reader:

Below our comments is a selection of excerpts from a report published by Assembly Member Ron Kim and some members of his staff. The entire report (part 3) can be found at the link here. In conjunction with Kim’s analysis, which we think may oversimplify the problem, we have posited our analysis of the steps needed to be taken so that the moral and legal imperative that creates a system that values life over profit gets actualized. 

1) statewide and interstate oversight – if there is problem in one facility no owner who holds any title to that facility should be able to license another facility, not in that state nor any other. This requires carefully recorded ownership records, a completely transparent process whereby management and ownership cannot be clouded by smoke and mirrors to allow for a clean slate once a facility gets overrun by violations and improper care.

2) penalties for each death that occurs in a facility that is not from natural causes or a “first do no harm” approach to the quality of care of patients – the facilities with the highest rates of death have a trail leading to inadequate staffing, problems within the facilities and absentee owners or private equity owners who view profitability over life as the gold standard in their market-making.

3) accountability – there should be NO QUALIFIED OR ANY OTHER IMMUNITY for the deaths that occur in nursing facilities, not in any state, not because of Covid-19 or any other “force majeure”. The deaths during Covid-19 were the result of a series of decisions by the owners/managers of these facilities, not only Governor Cuomo. They could have set up Covid-19 specific floors. They could have quarantined patients. They could have rented space or worked with other facilities. The choices that were made led to many (though not all) of the deaths, particularly in those facilities with the greatest loss of life during Covd-19. And the pandemic has only just begun. It is a foregone conclusion that the facilities owned by those with the greatest loss of life, have shared ownership in Florida, Texas and Arizona and the death-toll has only just started being tallied.

4) financial and legal responsibility to families – The nursing homes with the worst overall records prior to Covid-19 had the highest numbers of deaths, with few exceptions

PE or Publicly Traded Equity Owned Nursing Facilities, Covid-19 And the Profit in Negligence – No Oversight

Granite Creek Health and Rehabilitation would never require a worker to come to work sick. But they might ask.
Google Maps

Dear Readers:

We will say it once. We can say it 1000 times.

Nursing homes, rehabilitation facilities and elder care institutions are not burdened by appropriate oversight. In reality, they largely report to no one. And, with combined ownership on the real estate side and on the management/operations side in the hands of private equity firms and publicly traded companies, the flow of money is endless and nearly untraceable. 

These homes churn owners, in some cases so they can change oversight records, wiping the slate clean when abuse and neglect results in patient death. They collect money from the government in the form of payments, reimbursements and for some even PPP loans or SBA loans, which should trigger government oversight. But sadly oversight is simply in short supply. 

And alas, with front-facing ownership changes, history gets scrubbed. It is all a shell game; and one that traffics in human life. With Covid-19, these homes can profit from death. 

In many states, the owners of these facilities are largely exempt from liability, even in the case of gross negligence – a highly profitable exemption. And the politicians who have collected donations can look the other way as the owners profit and those most vulnerable die. Humanity be damned.  

State Investigating a Nursing Home That Allegedly Kept COVID-Positive Workers on the Job

A nursing assistant at a Prescott nursing home says she was told to continue to work with patients after informing her supervisor that she was symptomatic for COVID-19 — and also after she later tested positive for the disease.

Now, the state is investigating.

The facility, Granite Creek Health and Rehabilitation Center in Prescott, a skilled-nursing facility with more than 100 long-term residents and rehab patients from the local hospital, had been spared until early June from the pandemic. But as certified nursing assistant at the facility told Phoenix New Times, things spiraled out of control quickly after an employee tested positive for the novel coronavirus on June 9.

New Times is not disclosing the name of the worker based on her request for anonymity. Sick with COVID-19 and still trying to beat back the virus in home quarantine, she doesn’t want to return to Granite Creek and doesn’t want publicity.

“The state surveyor told me that they’re keeping my identity secret and calling me by the code name ‘Hero Worker’ LOL,” she wrote in an email on Tuesday. “I am still concerned that it being known that I reported this could affect my ability to find another job once I’m recovered.”

Mike Rasmussen, the facility’s administrator, confirmed on Tuesday that 16 staff members and 25 residents at Granite Creek have tested positive. He acknowledged in an email that the company would allow a COVID-positive staff member to come to work, and might ask but would not require that a sick staff member come to work.

Civil Immunity to Nursing Homes- A Blank Check for Abuse and Neglect, Covid-19

The following is an OPINION from Patricia Barnes at Forbes. We could not agree with the opinion more.

The Folly Of Granting Civil Immunity From Lawsuits To Nursing Homes

Granting broad immunity to nursing homes that failed to put in place reasonable protections for vulnerable residents during the pandemic represents an appalling abuse of the rule of law.

About 20 states already have granted nursing homes immunity from civil lawsuits stemming from the coronavirus pandemic and now the U.S. Congress is poised to do so. What’s the rush?

There has been no serious investigation into how nursing homes performed in the pandemic and there is plenty of reason for concern.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services reported Friday that 31,782 nursing home residents have died from COVID-19 as of May 31, which is about 33% of the nation’s known coronavirus deaths. The highest number of deaths occurred in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, which were among the first to grant civil immunity to nursing homes.

A grant of immunity effectively eliminates civil legal redress for and on behalf of nursing home residents who died due of COVID-19 due to negligence and abuse.

Nursing Care in NY – Lax Oversight, Fraud, Depleted PPE – the Body Count by the Numbers and Some Thoughts

THE PHOTOS (ABOVE AND BELOW) REVEAL WHAT A STATE WITH DEPLORABLE OVERSIGHT, POLITICALLY CONNECTED NURSING HOME OWNERS, AND MONEY-OVER-LIFE MORAL BANKRUPTCY LOOKS LIKE

The following link is from the State Website: https://www.health.ny.gov/statistics/diseases/covid-19/fatalities_nursing_home_acf.pdf

Forgive us if we do not trust that these numbers will remain “undoctored” tomorrow, so we have attached the PDF in photograph format. Please take a look. We maintain that it is not accurate. A few of those homes have a greater than reported body-count. 

We maintain that some of the homes on the list may have simply had a perfect storm of lousy circumstances. They may, indeed, be owned by some really and truly decent and caring people who find themselves in untenable circumstances. Covid-19 is not nursing home user-friendly. It is messy. It is expensive. It requires the owner to have a conscience. Some do. Some do not.

The vast majority of the worst hit homes have historically been plagued by health violations, abuse, lacking medical care, charging for services not performed, financial improprieties which include not only Medicare and Medicaid fraud but Worker’s Compensation fraud and human trafficking scandals. Some of it we have researched and some we have not. We are working on it.

We have been told by hospital social workers that the social workers and other hospital officials are often paid under-the-table to place certain nursing homes on the top of their lists of recommendations for patients. Since the government application for licensing requires that nursing homes prove that they can keep their beds full, it should come as no surprise that payoffs to the keep the beds full are commonplace, a cost of doing business. Personal experience supports that premise.