California’s Nursing Homes: This Has to Stop!

Although California spends nearly $5 billion in Medi-Cal funds per year on nursing home care, discrimination against Medi-Cal-eligible residents is systemic.

By
CANHR
on
June 22, 2017
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Feature
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Although California spends nearly $5 billion in Medi-Cal funds per year on nursing home care, discrimination against Medi-Cal-eligible residents is systemic. and the care provided to nursing home residents is getting worse every year. Poor regulatory oversight, minimal monetary penalties, repeat violations without consequences, and the never-ending quest by the nursing home industry for more money– these are only a few of the reasons that care is so bad and that the demand for nursing home care has decreased every year. 

Too many California nursing homes don’t want to keep residents once they’ve sucked all of the Medicare rehab funds from them - dumping (mainly Medi-Cal) residents into acute care hospitals as a matter of course and refusing to take them back regardless of administrative law decisions to the contrary.

Meanwhile, California’s Department of Public Health – the agency charged with providing regulatory oversight of nursing homes – has put on blindfolds, refusing to acknowledge the grievous violations that harm and, often kill, nursing home residents.  

From San Diego to Los Angeles to Madera to Santa Clara – it doesn’t seem to matter what part of the state the facility is in – residents are put at risk the minute they enter a California nursing home. A constant litany of sexual, verbal and physical abuse, neglect, refusal to provide pain medication, refusal to answer call buttons, allowing residents to lay in their own feces and urine, bedsores, falls resulting in broken bones and deaths and hundreds of preventable acute care hospital admissions at a cost of millions of dollars – this is the status of nursing homes in California in 2017.

- A resident in a Chowchilla nursing home was the victim of sexual abuse by a visitor who was known by the facility staff to be a registered sex offender.  (Fine = $2,000)

- A resident in a Santa Clara nursing home was sexually violated by a CNA who continued to work at the facility despite the report of sexual abuse. (Fine=$1,000)

- A staff member in a Los Angeles facility recorded videos and photos of residents without their consent and sent them to someone outside the facility.  (Fine=$2,000)

- A facility in Corona failed to report an outbreak of Legionnaire’s Disease to the Department of Health for three weeks after a resident was diagnosed with the disease putting all of the residents at risk of catching this often fatal disease. (Fine=$2,000)

Read the citations included in this Advocate carefully. Many of the incidents are also criminal violations, and it’s safe to say that most are never prosecuted. In fact, most of the staff that sexually abused residents are likely still working in a California nursing home. The small fines are a good indication of how the Department values the health, safety, security and privacy of residents.

Most recently, an Office of the Inspector General study that found 1/3 of Medicare beneficiaries suffered harm from neglect or poor care with an average length of stay approximately 6 weeks! https://oig.hhs.gov/oei/reports/oei-06-11-00370.pdf

Our response is clear: where’s the outrage? Why do our legislators and the Governor keep giving nursing homes more money every year?  Why is the Attorney General’s office out to lunch on nursing home abuse? The horrors that California’s nursing home residents are subjected to on a daily basis have to stop. CANHR is fighting hard to improve care, but there is no political will to change policies in any meaningful way. Join us. Let’s combine our voices, and tell our policymakers that poor, neglectful, and criminal care is not acceptable.”