"In my seven years as Attorney General," Mr Lockyer stated, "I have seen few more disturbing cases of public trust betrayed and gross abuse of the elderly who cannot defend themselves."
"The owner of these homes," he said, "lived in luxury on the taxpayers' dime while the senior citizens she was paid to care for lived in squalor."
And this is not isolated case. Serious elderly neglect and abuse is happening in nursing homes all over the country. In the fall of 2004, the Indiana state Department of Health inspected the Northgate Healthcare nursing home after it was reported that a man, who had open sores on his back, was taken to Marion General Hospital in October 2004 wearing clothing covered in excrement and fly maggots, according to state reports.
On May 19, 2006, the Indy Star reported that a grand jury had indicted Zanna Paul, a former director of nursing at Northgate, and Sandra Andersen, the facility's former administrator, with one count each of neglect of a dependent resulting in bodily injury, for allowing the resident to lay in his own waste for days with back sores and maggot-covered clothing.
Advocates for nursing home reform are outraged over these recent cases. "These examples of egregious behavior should always be treated as what they truly are - criminal neglect and or abuse," says Barbara "Bee" Becker, an ardent advocate for senior citizens in nursing homes since 1999, when her mother-in-law, Helen Straukamp, was assaulted and killed by a known violent, convicted criminal patient in a facility in Evansville, Indiana.
"When a vulnerable, disabled person is found in such conditions in a private home in the community," she points out, "the caregiver is criminally investigated, criminally charged and, if found guilty, answers to a criminal court."
"However," she continues, "when this inexcusable lack of basic humane care occurs behind the doors of a long-term care facility, provided by professionals who are hired by and answer to corporate entities which cower behind shell company shenanigans, it is usually treated as nothing more than a negotiable regulatory infraction."
"Profiting from these inhumane conditions, some of which are reminiscent of prison camps," Ms Becker says, "is also Medicaid and Medicare fraud."
"The providers are profiting from not providing mandated care, and doing so at primarily taxpayer expense," she notes.
"If the providers don't know what constitutes providing even minimal human necessities, they should never be licensed, or entitled to keep a license, to participate in the business," she contends.
Civil monetary penalties are one of 8 remedies that may used to address deficiencies in quality of care or safety standards. The fines can be assessed per day of noncompliance or per instance of noncompliance, and dollar ranges are to correspond with the seriousness of harm to the patients.
However, fines and civil penalties, Ms Becker states, often fall victim to the industry's "negotiations" with oversight agencies. "The actions may disappear entirely," she says, "or they may be reduced or, even if they stick, they may not ever even be collected."
To verify this assertion, she points to an April 2005 reported titled: Nursing Home Enforcement: The Use of Civil Money Penalties, that describes reduction, assessment, and collection patterns for civil money penalties imposed by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services in 2000 and 2001, published by the Office of Inspector General after conducting an investigation.
During the investigation, the OIG analyzed 100% of the data from CMS's regionally based Long-Term Care Enforcement Tracking System for enforcement actions beginning in 2000 and 2001, in which a CMP was imposed. The LTC database is a compilation of each CMS region's nursing home enforcement case files.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
