"What Happened in Room 10?" Life Care Center of Kirkland WA, COVID, and for-profit neglect of elders

[muriel_volestrangler]

This is a long article. It starts with how the first hotspot of Covid-19 developed in Washington State, and that's harrowing enough. But it's the system that allowed the disaster that really makes you mad:

Still, in the early 2000s, a number of large nursing-home operators came forward to say that they were in financial distress and at risk of failure — and that the most decisive reason for this was low Medicaid reimbursement rates. While Medicare often pays nursing homes handsomely for providing skilled rehab and therapy (sometimes more than $1,000 per day), state Medicaid programs pay much less (on average, around $200 per resident per day) for “long-term” care. Nursing homes said that they were bleeding out money because of Medicaid patients.

Most facilities, however, found a way to tip the balance in their favor. Many reserve beds for more-lucrative rehab patients, though it is illegal for them to discriminate based on payment source. Some rush patients through therapy schedules: declaring them fit to leave as soon as they have maxed out their most highly reimbursed Medicare coverage days, and then filling the bed with someone new. In a number of states, reports of illegal nursing-home evictions — often of residents on Medicaid or about to go on Medicaid — have risen. The phenomenon is so common that there is now a catchphrase for the practice: “resident dumping.” Residents are sometimes packed into vans and then abandoned in low-budget motels, or homeless shelters, or even onto street corners — or, in one reported instance in Maryland, into a storage facility.

In 2012, the U.S. Department of Justice filed a case against Life Care Centers of America, accusing the company of Medicare fraud. Two employees, in two different states, had come forward to say that awful things were happening at company nursing homes. According to court documents, Life Care therapists “canvassed the facility looking for residents they could provide therapy to in order to increase billing.” Sometimes, this resulted in old, sick people receiving needless rehab sessions up to seven or eight times in a single day. According to the Justice Department complaint, one resident who could not walk was allegedly carried up and down the hallway so that the nursing home could bill Medicare for walking therapy. A 92-year-old man who was dying of metastatic cancer was allegedly given 48 minutes of physical therapy, 47 minutes of occupational therapy, and 30 minutes of speech therapy two days before he died, despite the fact that “he was spitting out blood.” At one Life Care facility in Florida, the entire rehab staff had signed a letter declaring that they had “been encouraged to maximize reimbursement even when clinically inappropriate.” They also said that the command to boost rehab billing had come straight from Forrest Preston, who had allegedly intervened to thwart the work of his own internal compliance officers.

Although Life Care and Preston denied the charges, in 2016, the company agreed to pay $145 million to settle the case. At the time, the settlement was the largest ever between the U.S. government and a nursing home. But it hardly set Life Care apart. All five of the country’s largest nursing-home chains have been accused of fraudulent practices by the federal government. (In addition to Life Care, two others settled “false claims” cases for tens of millions of dollars.)

https://story.californiasunday.com/covid-life-care-center-kirkland-washington

It goes on to explain how the companies are financially structured to avoid liability for their neglect. It's all about profit.

[I_UndergroundPanther]

1. Profit

Needs to stop being seen as an incentive. It's theft basically.

Profit needs to be cut out.
Like the greed supporting cancer it is.

If capitalism dies maybe it's about time.

Healthcare and all the things people depend on and need should never be made for profit.