York Law Firm

COVID-19 Nursing Home Databases All nursing homes are not the same, especially when it comes to infection control and keeping residents safe from deadly viruses. If there is any silver lining in the pandemic, it is that the virus plainly exposed the poorly managed facilities. Nursing homes that had rigorous protocols in place and which followed the letter of the law have come through far better than those which cut corners and put profits above people. According to the CMS, a...s of June 1, 2021, more than 650,000 nursing home residents contracted COVID-19, and more than 130,000 died. Those are the official government statistics, but the actual numbers may be higher. A recent report out of Michigan, for example, claims that the state’s official death count may be 100% higher than reported. If you are looking for a skilled nursing facility to place a loved one in, and if you have a choice, we strongly encourage you to review the CMS database and compare infection and death rates. Forget about CMS 5-star ratings; the nursing homes have long ago figured out ways to manipulate their ratings. READ FULL ARTICLE HERE: http://amp.gs/jInW5

Unlicensed Owners Have a License To Kill Nursing Home Residents Driving a car without a license in California can get you arrested and fined but running a nursing home without a license turns out to have surprisingly little impact on the for-profit chains flouting the law. Data from the California Department of Public Health show that between 2015 and 2020, 250 applications were submitted to change ownership of California’s 1200 nursing homes, and just 5% of applications were... rejected. The only facilities to be denied a license were ones connected to ReNew Health Group, a chain we wrote about last month that is responsible for 128 violations in three years, including 14 categorized as immediate jeopardy. READ FULL ARTICLE HERE: http://amp.gs/jImxI

Doctor Arrested on Suspicion of $6 Million Medicare Fraud A medical license is a highly prestigious credential signaling that the holder has completed rigorous training and has been approved by his or her peers as having the skills, knowledge, and experience to provide medical care. Physicians as a group are among the highest income earners in the United States, a fact with which hardly anyone would take issue. Doctors make a lot of money because they sacrificed years of thei...r lives to attain a body of knowledge that makes them highly valued in society. It should be evident that a license to practice medicine is not a license to game the Medicare system, but not everyone agrees. Last Thursday, a 58-year-old physician in Porter Ranch, CA, was arrested by Federal authorities and charged with $6 million in fraudulent billings to Medicare. According to the complaint, the doctor, who operated two home health clinics in Tujunga and Reseda, falsely certified patients to receive care and submitted reimbursement claims for services that were either not provided or were medically unnecessary. If this physician is convicted on all counts, she faces up to 40 years in prison. READ FULL ARTICLE: http://amp.gs/bsWo

Skilled Nursing Facilities $11 Million Dollar Settlement for Sava SeniorCare 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 a big win for the people against nursin...g home chains ripping off the system? Unfortunately, if you look under the hood at the settlement, it’s another example of a big corporation that took advantage of the system and got a slap on the wrist. The US Attorney alleged that between 2008 and 2018, the chain Sava SeniorCare submitted false claims to Medicaid for rehab therapy services and false claims to Medicare and Medicaid for grossly and materially substandard and/or worthless skilled nursing services, which were caused in large part by the chain’s failure to provide a sufficient number of skilled nursing staff. The Sava SeniorCare chain agreed to pay $11.2 million dollars. READ FULL ARTICLE: http://amp.gs/bUEh

Another Nursing Home Chain Accused of Putting Profits over People 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 the bad apples is a laudable objective, but the lawsuit high...lights a fundamental problem of our well-intentioned regulators: too little, too late. No doubt, the Department of Justice and the DA’s will eventually succeed in penalizing Mariner Health Care Services, but we must ask, ‘what took them so long?’ It’s not as if the family of companies, based in Maryland and Georgia, which operates 19 skilled nursing facilities in California, has a spotless record. Indeed, the New York Times published an article last September in which it documented the case of an 87-year-old woman with dementia who was sent to a hospital Emergency Room because she was scaring other residents. Twenty-four hours later, when the hospital discharged her, the nursing home refused to take her back. READ FULL ARTICLE: http://amp.gs/bzNl

Should State Surveyors Be Consultants or Enforcers To Nursing Homes? Who stands firm and resolute when it comes to holding Skilled Nursing Facilities, psychiatric hospitals, home health agencies, hospice agencies, intermediate care facilities, dialysis clinics, and adult day health centers accountable when they violate the rules and California regulations protecting patients? Well, it turns out that California’s Health Facility Evaluator Nurses (HFENs) work in the trenches. A...s a group, they are overworked and underpaid, typically earning between $5,500 and $7,300 per month, by the California Department of Public Health. Among other things, it is their job to inspect, investigate, survey, and evaluate health facilities for conformity with licensing and certification requirements and compliance with State and Federal laws. When HFENs note deficiencies, they write reports, provide support for civil,monetary and administrative penalties. PLEASE READ FULL ARTICLE HERE: https://www.yorklawcorp.com/state-enforcing-nursing-homes/

A Silver Tsunami of Covid Nursing Home Deaths Is Yet To Come The fact that 115,000 people have so far died this year in nursing homes from COVID-19, and many times have become infected has prompted many families to reconsider whether to place their elderly loved ones in such institutions. According to the Wall Street Journal, overall occupancy in US nursing homes is down 15%, or 195,000 residents, in the past year. The decline in nursing homes covered by Medicare is even st...eeper, as shown in the chart below. The truth is that almost no one wants to live in a nursing home, especially now that 2 in 5 US deaths have occurred in such facilities, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. They are last resort institutions, for use when an older person becomes too sick to care for themselves and when they have no one else available to provide daily support. Nursing homes, skilled nursing facilities, and rehabilitation facilities serve an essential purpose in our society. Still, by and large, they have been neglected, causing the industry’s reputation to (rightfully) suffer. PLEASE READ FULL ARTICLE HERE: https://www.yorklawcorp.com/covid-nursing-home-deaths/

Covid Nursing Home Staff Deaths Under Reported A report published on November 30th in Kaiser Health News https://khn.org//osha-let-employers-decide-whether-to-rep/ paints a disturbing picture of nursing homes. According to the investigation, State and federal law require nursing homes to alert OSHA {Occupational Safety and Health Administration) about work-related employee deaths. Still, many facilities decide not to report them. KHN looked at 240 deaths of health care work...ers in 2020, many of whom were nursing home employees, and found that one-third were never reported. Why? Because the Employer Facilities unilaterally decide whether to label a healthcare worker’s death as work-related and decide whether the death should be reported to OSHA. There is no independent review of the Employer’s decision. Below is a table showing KHN’s findings. READ FULL ARTICLE HERE: https://www.yorklawcorp.com/covid-nursing-home-staff-death/

California Nursing Home Complaints Guidelines Changed by CDPH Alert! California Department of Public Health (CDPH) Website Change Undermines Whether Nursing Home Complaints Will Ever Be Investigated. In the past few months, the California Department of Public Health changed how it formats online complaints that families file against health facilities, including skilled nursing facilities and elder care homes. The online field where the person making the complaint enters their... contact information has been hidden from view, and as a result, nearly all complaints filed since that change occurred have been anonymous. We encourage you to read the full article to see how these changes can impact you or your loved one. READ FULL ARTICLE HERE: https://www.yorklawcorp.com/california-nursing-home-compla/

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My office with a view today. Serving justice from a tree house. #remoteworking #treehouse #yorklawfirm

An Icon, a Warrior of Justice for all, under 5’ but stronger than any NFL Lineman. She was an inspiration to me. I love you, RBG.

"Special Focus Facility" Program - The Worst of the Worst In 2017, a Lyft driver, Rex Riley, was called to a nursing home in Hawaii, the Legacy Hilo Rehabilitation & Nursing Center, with instructions to pick up a 76-year-old man with dementia. The nursing home requested that Lyft take the man to a hotel 110 miles away, where they reserved a room for him. Two hours later, when Riley arrived at the hotel, he discovered that the nursing home neglected to arrange for payment. The... hotel wouldn’t take him. In addition, the resident, confused and incapable of making any plans, had no identification, no medication, no money, and no credit card. Worse still, the Lyft driver, a former paramedic, noticed that the man was in poor physical shape, and his feet were turning blue. An urgent call to the Legacy Hilo nursing home went unanswered! Riley called 911, and medics took the 76-year-old to a hospital, where he remained for the next five months. The actions taken by Legacy Hilo in 2017 put the nursing home in a highly undesirable group called the Special Focus Facility (SFF) Program. Please Read Full Article: https://www.yorklawcorp.com/sacramento-bay-area-and-northe/

Avoiding Coronavirus Scams Tips from the National Center on Elder Abuse (NCEA) As if things weren’t bad enough with a global Coronavirus pandemic, now come reports that con artists are using the disaster to steal money and gain access to personal information. They do so by preying on fears with false health claims, stimulus check scams, robocalls, and phishing using well-honed tactics to separate the elderly from their money. Fortunately, the FTC and the National Center on ...Elder Abuse (NCEA) are fighting back with an informational campaign designed to educate seniors and their caregivers about how to spot and avoid Coronavirus scams. Remember, awareness is the first and most crucial step in avoiding scams. The prudent thing to do is always to follow the general rule: If it sounds too good to be true, it is. Please Read Full Article Here: https://www.yorklawcorp.com/avoiding-coronavirus-scams-tip/

Happy Fourth of July from York Law Firm.

#VisitationSavesLives For the past three months, nursing homes and skilled nursing facilities nationwide have been on lock-down and for a good reason. Deaths in nursing homes skyrocketed at the start of COVID-19 and have accounted for 1 in 10 cases, as well as 1 in 4 deaths, nationwide. During the past few months, steps that such facilities have taken to keep visitors away has certainly saved lives, but now it seems that the pendulum is swinging the other way. By keeping vi...sitors away, nursing home residents have become increasingly isolated, which is resulting in many new cases of elder neglect. With friends and relatives unable to visit, some facilities are seizing on the opportunity to provide even fewer services to their residents. The California Advocates for Nursing Home Reform (CANHR) announced that it is participating in a national effort to restore visitation to residents in long term care facilities. Why is that? Because the harm from keeping visitors away is now causing more damage to residents than the Coronavirus itself. Please Read Full Article Here: https://www.yorklawcorp.com/visitationsaveslives/

Wendy will not even let COVID-19 get in the way of her fight for justice for her clients, even if that means conducting depositions via zoom. For the time being, this is today's new normal. Be well friends and stay safe.

Nursing homes and assisted living facilities have been closed to visitors for over 100 days. Please join CANHR on June 30th for a day of action #visitationsaveslifes. Please visit the link below for a social media toolkit with instructions on how you can participate in this life saving day. #CANHR #governornewsom #cagoverernor #californiadss #capublichealth #yorklawfirm https://visitationsaveslives.com/social-media-toolkit/

Burns from Sun Exposure One of my colleagues recently handled a case where a resident was left out on the patio of a skilled nursing facility in a wheelchair, and the resident was unable to talk or move. The staff put him out on the patio thinking, oh he’ll be able to get the fresh air. But then they left him out there unattended for three hours. Of course, he was in the shade at first, but in the hours that followed, he started getting more and more sun. Remember that here... in Sacramento, especially in the summer, temperatures can soar in the early afternoon as the sun rises higher and higher. It can be a balmy 80 degrees at 11AM but by 2PM temperatures can rapidly climb to well over 100 degrees. A 92-year-old man’s skin is extremely sensitive to burns. In a matter of an hour, the man had blisters all over his face and arms every exposed part of his body. Unfortunately, he was incapable of speaking or moving, so he was defenseless against prolonged sun exposure he had absolutely no way of calling for help. His caregivers were supposed to keep him safe, but they failed. Please Read Full Article Here: https://www.yorklawcorp.com/burns-from-sun-exposure/

Burns from Scalding I recently had a case of an adult disabled woman who was mentally and physically impaired very impaired. She was in an assisted living facility that was licensed by the Department of Social Services, and that facility had poor Safety Awareness. Their facility was staffed lean and mean. At some point, they had cameras monitoring patients, but someone, we don’t know who removed them. One day my client was in the kitchen of the facility where the staff was ...preparing boiling water for tea. Unfortunately, the tea kettle was missing so they were boiling water on the stove in a pan. My mentally and physically impaired and disabled client took the boiling pan of water and drank it. She had scalding burns down her face and in internally in her throat. And, of course, she had to be hospitalized for a significant amount of time. The nursing facility tried to argue that it was her own fault what sane person tries to drink boiling hot water, right? That was complete nonsense! She wasn’t sane, of course, which is why she was in the facility in the first place. Please Read Full Article Here: https://www.yorklawcorp.com/burns-from-scalding/

A Win For Civil Rights, LGBTQ & America Finally, some good news! The US Supreme Court yesterday ruled 6-to-3 that the 1964 Civil Rights Act protects gay and transgender Americans from workplace discrimination. Perhaps the most striking aspect of the ruling is the fact that it comes from a Court that is now overwhelmingly conservative. Despite that, one recent Trump appointee, Justice Gorsuch, in addition to Chief Justice Roberts, joined Justices Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor, a...nd Kagan in doing the right thing and protecting the rights of LGBTQ Americans. This is a simple and profound victory for LGBT civil rights, said Suzanne B. Goldberg, a law professor at Columbia. Many of us feared that the court was poised to gut sex discrimination protections and allow employers to discriminate based on sexual orientation and gender identity, yet it declined the federal government’s invitation to take that damaging path. As a result of the ruling, employers may not discriminate against a person’s sex or transgender status. Employers who fire individuals for being gay or transgender will be violating Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and will be held accountable. Read Full Article Here: https://www.yorklawcorp.com/a-win-for-civil-rights-lgbtq-a/

Obtaining Medical Records Part 3 It is fascinating for me to see a new generation growing up with technology, and how so many of them are facile with coding and electronically stored information. The world of record-keeping has moved from analog paper files to digital files stored in electronic health record systems stored in the cloud. Surprisingly, the laws surrounding record keeping are a little behind the reality of how the world works, which means that some institution...s are trying to conceal information by pretending that they aren’t technologically savvy. Let me give you an example. My firm recently contacted the parent company in Nebraska of a facility here in Northern California when we were told that the records of a client’s father who had passed away were stored on-site there. For months the company tried to block our requests to access the raw electronic data directly, telling us first that they didn’t have it, and then that it would not be possible to view it. The fact that they were blocking our requests so hard was a real red flag; this only strengthened our resolve to get the information. Read Full Article Here: https://www.yorklawcorp.com/obtaining-medical-records-part/

Medical Records Part 2 When bad things happen in hospitals, skilled nursing facilities, and assisted living facilities, the administrators of those institutions will not want to be held accountable. It’s human nature to avoid responsibility, especially when liability can bring with it major punitive and financial damages for a skilled nursing facility chain. At York Law Firm, we get calls every day from families of patients who have suffered major, and sometimes life-threaten...ing injuries. We know how hard it can be to obtain the medical records. In many cases, facilities will stonewall families in hopes that their requests for records and documents will go away. It takes time and energy to pursue medical records. But the law is on your side. By law, facilities are required to produce all medical records of a deceased patient when they are presented with an appropriate request from an authorized person. When the facility believes that they may be responsible or have significant liability risk, you can be sure that they will not make it easy in giving you the health records. That, in and of itself, is a tell-tale sign that a case is worth pursuing. Please Read Full Article Here: https://www.yorklawcorp.com/medical-records-part-2/