What’s Wrong with Whistleblower Lawsuits
Consulate Health Care will have to defend itself again over a 2017 judgment. Three years ago, after a 22-day trial, a jury issued a $347.8 million judgment against Consulate Health Care, Florida’s largest nursing home chain. A year later it was overturned. Now, an Appeals court partially reversed the judgment, lowering it to $255 million. While a huge drop, it is still meaningless, because it will never be paid. Consulate was accused of upcoding therapy billing at a few of its nursing facilities. Except that at the time, these facilities were apparently operated by a different company that subsequently purchased Consulate and took on its name. I hate to say it,... Read More »
Federal Oversight Coming To Assisted Living?
Congressional report on assisted living and COVID-19 looks more like a hatchet job than really trying to help. Senators Warren and Markey’s report is in, and try counting how many times the word “federal” was used, as in there are no “federal” reporting requirements, data should be regularly reported to the “federal” government, assisted living facilities should receive support through “federal” programs, and on and on. They had sent a very detailed questionnaire to the 11 largest assisted living operators, and found that 24% of the communities operated by them had at least one positive COVID-19 test, and 8% had outbreaks of at least 10 residents, with positive cases coming in at more... Read More »
Returning Home To Assisted Living
After being pulled out of her assisted living community because of the pandemic, a mother asks to return “home.” In the June issue of The SeniorCare Investor we wrote about how an industry professional lost the argument with his younger sister about moving their mother out of her assisted living community and into the sister’s home. As it turns out, the sister should have listened to him. The sister and her husband were very accommodating, giving up their master bedroom with bath and moving into the guest room. The problem was that this meant the mother was living on the second floor, and since she already had two hip replacements, she was afraid to go up and down the stairs.... Read More »
Employee Raises at No Cost?
One academic believes it won’t cost nursing homes a dime to raise wages. Okay, here I go again about The New York Times. This time, it is not about a reporter, but a contributing academic who is an economics professor at Northwestern University, Seema Jayachandran. Last weekend she wrote about how higher hourly wages can increase productivity, which can translate into higher-quality service. She based her conclusions on two studies looking at department stores and nursing homes. I will talk about the latter one. The study she cites suggests that if every county increased its minimum wage by 10%, there could be 15,000 fewer deaths in nursing homes each year. While I am sure an extra... Read More »
“Benevolent Incarceration” in Assisted Living
Some assisted living residents are getting restless. Why should they be any different from the rest of us? The Wall Street Journal recently published an opinion piece by a 94-year old resident of an assisted living community in New Jersey, where he wrote that he had mixed feelings about his “benevolent incarceration” during this pandemic. While he understands that the current restrictions are to keep him and the other residents safe, he raises some valid questions. At his community, no residents have tested positive for COVID-19, while three staff members have already recovered from it. Yet, the residents still can’t eat in the dining room, all meals are delivered to the apartments where... Read More »Schedule a demo
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