Florida Treats Seniors Worse Than Dogs

(Newswire.net — September 19, 2017) West Palm Beach, FLORIDA — In the aftermath of Hurricane Irma, people were stunned to learn that at least 8 south Florida nursing home residents had literally cooked to death in their rooms at The Rehabilitation Center in Hollywood Hills, Florida. Florida Governor Rick Scott, who most likely plans to run for Florida Senate, even called it “unfathomable”.  

If you know the history of how the Florida legislature has treated nursing home residents over the last 30 or so years, it is quite fathomable. If a kennel owner mistreated and killed 8 dogs, he would go to jail. If a day care owner mistreated and killed 8 children, he would go to jail. In this Hollywood Florida tragedy, it is doubtful anyone will go to jail, and the families of the dead residents will not get justice. Florida has the largest elderly population in the nation, yet nursing home residents get horribly mistreated like this every day. In most cases, there is no media coverage, no outrage, and no accountability. Florida treats seniors worse than dogs.

The Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO) requires accredited hospitals and facilities to maintain functioning emergency generators capable of running the air conditioning and other key systems in the result of power failure. Florida does not require nursing homes to maintain this basic life-safety feature. Isn’t it foreseeable that nursing homes in Florida could lose power, and that immobile elderly residents would be at risk of over-heating and dying?

In 1980, the Miami Herald published an in-depth investigation about how Florida nursing homes were horribly mistreating residents with impunity.   As a result of that investigation, Florida passed the “Nursing Home Residents’ Rights Act”, a series of statutes designed to protect elderly and vulnerable nursing home residents.  

However, since the early 1990’s, the Florida legislature, aided by Governors Jeb Bush and later Rick Scott, have steadily eroded those Residents’ Rights under the guise of “tort reform”. While the Nursing Home industry lobby was pumping literally millions of dollars of campaign contributions to their causes, these Governors and legislators weakened punitive damages, lowered staffing levels, weakened safety regulations, and made many changes that made it much harder to hold nursing home owners accountable. The Florida legislature and Governor passed pro-industry anti-resident changes in 2000, 2003, 2009 and 2013.

Florida is one of the only states in America where you can operate a nursing home with literally no liability insurance at all. Pennsylvania requires nursing home owners to carry at least 1 million in coverage. New Jersey requires $500,000. Florida requires zero. You have to carry insurance to drive a car in Florida, but you can operate a nursing home that cares for hundreds of sick, elderly and vulnerable residents without any insurance at all.  

And to make matters worse, Florida also allows out of state shadow Limited Liability Companies (LLC’s) to be the owners. Most nursing homes in Florida are owned by a maze of corporate LLC’s such that it is impossible to determine who actually operates the facility, and who to sue when residents get mistreated and killed. By the time any lawyer figures this out and gets a judgement, the LLC is usually dissolved and a new one pops us. Not wanting to spend years chasing uninsured shadow LLCs, most lawyers will not pursue nursing home cases, so injured residents never get any justice.

Nursing home owners make millions, and even billions, of dollars in profit and almost all of it comes from tax dollars in the form of Medicaid and Medicare. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services inspector general’s report found that 37 percent of nursing homes failed to meet quality of care requirements while they received more than $5 billion in Medicare payments. And the industry is more profitable than ever. According to Morningstar.com, stock prices for publicly traded nursing home companies have increased an average of 1,402 percent over the past 10 years, outpacing the Dow Jones Average sevenfold. There is no legitimate reason the Florida legislature has systematically eroded residents’ rights and allows out of state shadow LLC’s to operate uninsured nursing homes without basic life-safety features like generators.

The Agency For Healthcare Administration (AHCA) used to be tough on nursing homes that violate state and Federal minimum standards.  Jeb Bush and Rick Scott weakened this agency so much that nursing homes rarely get punished for breaking rules that protect elderly and vulnerable citizens. One in five of the state’s nursing homes are on a state “watch list” for substandard care. Many more should be.

Another insidious trick that the Florida legislature has allowed nursing home owners to unleash against elderly and vulnerable citizens is the ‘mandatory arbitration clause’. When families are putting their loved ones into a nursing home they are usually frightened and confused. They are handed a stack of papers on admission. Most of the papers they sign discuss bed-hold policies, Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements, and other innocuous administrative issues. What most residents and their families don’t realize is that almost every nursing home in Florida now makes residents sign away their constitutional right to a jury trial in favor of mandatory arbitration. Many times the terms of the arbitration are secret and designed to protect the facility that wrote the agreement. Florida allows this.

Brian Lee was Florida’s Long Term Care Ombudsman for over a decade. His primary job was a state government position designed to protect residents. He had a reputation for protecting residents and making sure families of residents could gather transparent financial and ownership information about the nursing homes where they put their loved ones. When the Nursing Home Industry did not like what Brian Lee was doing, Rick Scott fired him in 2011 and replaced him with someone the Nursing Home Industry liked. Now the fox is guarding the henhouse. “Unfathomable” indeed.

Nathan P. Carter

Nathan Carter is a partner at the Orlando law firm of Colling Gilbert Wright & Carter. He and his firm have handled nursing home cases for residents and their families for over 30 years in Florida and in many other states. He has chaired many nursing home committees for the Florida Justice Association, which is one of the only groups that fight for nursing home residents rights in Tallahassee.  Mr. Carter has testified on behalf of residents rights many times in Tallahassee over the last 25 years. He also testified before a United States Senate subcommittee on Nursing Home transparency issues in 2008.