Nursing homes invoke Trump-era protections to fight lawsuits over Covid deaths

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

Nursing homes are increasingly seeking to shield themselves from a raft of wrongful death lawsuits from the families of Covid-19 victims by invoking new liability protections they received from Washington last year as the coronavirus tore through the facilities.

About 200 lawsuits in nearly half the states have already been filed, and the industry says it’s bracing for many more in the coming months given the virus’ outsize toll on residents and staff. But an emergency preparedness law expanded by Congress last year limiting health providers’ exposure to coronavirus-related lawsuits — and the Trump administration’s broad interpretation of those protections — are upending litigation against nursing homes.

The powerful nursing home lobbies, which spent at least $4 million lobbying Washington last year, were among the health groups that successfully urged Congress and statehouses last spring to grant expanded protections, arguing that they faced shortages of personal protective equipment and shifting guidance from the federal government on battling the virus. Patient advocates contend that some nursing homes were negligent in their handling of the virus, pointing to the industry’s documented history of problems with infection control.

Even before the pandemic, nursing homes already benefited from strong legal protections. Advocates for residents of the facilities, who argue that Congress didn’t mean to provide such sweeping immunity, worry that efforts to hold nursing homes accountable for what they argue were preventable Covid deaths will be virtually impossible if courts take a broad view of the new protections.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/nursing-homes-invoke-trump-era-protections-to-fight-lawsuits-over-covid-deaths/ar-AAKgzwC

[MineralMan]

1. Nursing homes are a high-risk business, when it comes to lawsuits.

They all have some sort of insurance, although many are self-insured within their corporate identity.

The COVID-19 pandemic threw a huge monkey-wrench into the works of that industry. Normally, they are understaffed, due to the poor wages they pay, and there are not enough qualified workers out there. So, the care given in many of them is not up to par, even in normal times.

They are not full of healthy patients, either. Instead, they are full of people on the downhill end of life. Something like the pandemic can sweep in and wipe out such vulnerable people very quickly, and it did.

In the current way most nursing homes are operated, there isn't really a very good answer to this challenge. Most have a substantial population of Medicaid patients who have exhausted their own resources, and Medicaid does not pay enough to ensure top-quality care. That makes matters ever worse.

Some nursing homes try very hard to provide excellent care. Others do not try so hard. Some don't try at all, and provide only custodial care, really. Figuring out which are which isn't easy if you're part of a family that must use such care for an elderly family member.

Lawsuits are not the answer. A rethinking of the entire end-of-life care system is desperately needed. But, without much better pay for those who actually do the patient care, nothing is going to solve this problem. Working in a nursing home is a terrible, mind-sapping job for most employees. The stress is unremitting.

If enough of these lawsuits are filed and succeed, many nursing homes will be forced to shut down, and that isn't the answer, either.

[iamateacher]

5. Well said

I have two close relatives in the industry.

[keithbvadu2]

2. Many nursing homes had very low rates of COVID with the same external conditions.

Many nursing homes had very low rates of COVID with the same external conditions.

What did they do that the high rate places could not?.

[thucythucy]

3. For decades now the nursing home lobby has been fighting

the expansion of home health services.

Many if not most of the people in nursing homes could be cared for at home, and at less expense to both taxpayers and insurers.

As a part of the disability rights/independent living movements I've seen folks who are spinal cord injured quadriplegics live at home despite the level of care they need. I knew a ventilator dependent quad. who lived at home for decades, and only had to be hospitalized for the worst medical crises--for instance kidney or bladder infections. Even then much of the care was delivered at home by PCA's (personal care assistants) and visiting nurses. Besides which, such infections occur in nursing homes all the time.

Instead of going with this model our country persists in seeing nursing homes as the go-to for elderly and medically vulnerable people. This is entirely the result of the fact that the nursing home lobby spends millions each year opposing any expansion of home services, while the independent living movement by contrast has practically no lobby presence at all, either at the state or local level.

And so comes the pandemic and we see how stuffing vulnerable people into segregated settings is both inhumane and dangerous. Lucky for the nursing home industry it was able--yet again--to bend the law to keep itself both profitable and immune from consequence.

Another instance of the good of the few (nursing home owners and executives) working against the general good of society.

[Freddie]

6. There will still be a need for nursing homes and assisted living

Home care is great unless they need 24/7 care on an indefinite basis. My brother and I tried that route when both our parents needed at least someone there 24/7. Cost like 4x as much as an assisted living facility, plus they still had to pay property taxes and utilities on the house. It was heart-wrenching but we finally talked them into going to a nearby assisted living place (a nice one) where Dad complained endlessly for the next 5 years.
What is really needed is to tax the rich to pay for better salaries for all caregivers whether in home care or a facility. They all run on a constant understaffing model that cannot handle an emergency such as COVID.

[thucythucy]

7. It is possible to provide home care 24-7,

unless there's a need for critical care or monitoring.

The problem you cite is one of expense, not medical feasibility.

Home health care is so expensive for consumers because it isn't subsidized by state and federal governments the way nursing homes and assisted living facilities are. If the same supports and tax incentives were provided to home health care, the cost for consumers (and taxpayers as well) would be far less prohibitive.

The low salaries and staffing are all part and parcel of a profit driven health care industry.

[Takket]

4. These lawsuits will have an incredibly high standard to meet

Recall at the beginning of the pandemic how woefully (and intentionally) unprepared the entire country was. We had known since late December 2019 at least that the pandemic was ravaging Wuhan and drumpf chose to ignore the inevitability of it spreading here. By March it was raging and the government was only then very slowly beginning to respond, and those three months we had to prepare were completely lost.

The article quotes lawsuits claiming things like nursing homes failing to provide adequate PPE. There WAS NO PPE. We could not even get it to nurses and doctors fighting the crisis in hospitals, let alone nursing homes. And as the deaths mounted we had Kushner standing there telling us with a sinister smile that the PPE stockpile did not belong to the states.

By the time drumpf begrudgingly activated the defense production act, the disease had already spread through our nursing homes. The only response states had, with no direction from the federal government, was to order people to stay home. Pretty much the worse case scenario for a nursing home... tell everyone to stay in a highly populated enclosed environment. With drumpf sticking his head in the sand and resisting efforts to fight the virus, the nursing homes were left with no more clairvoyance on how to deal with the crisis than any of the rest of us.

This was a natural disaster no one, nursing homes included, were able to react to. I'm sure there will be some fringe cases where complete incompetence led to deaths, but nursing homes have a very strong case for these lawsuits that expecting them to be able to handle a pandemic, when already dealing with populations of those most vulnerable to covid, when no one else had any idea how to handle it, is unrealistic.