Philadelphia Personal Injury Attorney Blog | Pomerantz Perlberger & Lewis LLP

On May 15, Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal spoke before Congress and proposed a powerful federal-state partnership to protect patients from nursing home abuse, neglect. In particular, he cited the growing consolidation of nursing homes under parent companies that can not only funnel huge profits to the hungry maw of the great octopus, but can also use their many tendrils to confuse and deflect state oversight agencies.

In particular, he cited the case of Haven Healthcare, which operated 25 homes in New England before filing for bankruptcy in November 2007. The company neglected its nursing homes, staffing them at the minimum level, well below state or national averages. The nursing homes were cited for hundreds of violations, but the company did not improve the quality of care, rather preferring to pay its fines, sometimes less than $3000 in state and federal penalties for a lethal act of neglect.

The company let its utility bills go unpaid until the utilities went to the Connecticut state government with a threat to shut down power at six of the company's nursing homes for delinquency in payment. This company had been cited for hundreds of potentially and actually deadly violations of standards of nursing home care. It paid its fines, sometimes less than $3000 for a lethal act of neglect, an. The company received $130 million annually from Medicare and Medicaid, with much of the money earmarked for reimbursement of expenses for drugs and equipment for residents, but it ran up a debt of $ 20 million to pharmaceutical and equipment suppliers. This is above and beyond the nearly $80,000 a year paid by each resident of the 1300-bed system not on Medicare.

So where did the money go? It's hard to tell, but at least $15 million of it went into the hands of Chief Executive Officer Raymond Termini. Termini received about $5 million worth of assets directly into his wife's checking account, while the other $10 million was sunk into country music label Category 5 Records, headlined by singer Travis Tritt until it was also gutted by Termini, according to a suit filed by the singer against the label. According to the suit, Category 5 Records did not invest in promotion of Tritt's album The Storm, including a failure to provide promotional travel expenses. The suit also claims that the label fired most of its staff prior to the release of the second single off the album, making the company essentially defunct. How much of this company's assets were absorbed by Termini are unknown at this point, but it is known that the drain of this investment adversely affected the solvency of Haven Healthcare and threatened the lives of many residents through nursing home neglect.

But is Blumenthal's suggestion for a robust investigative arm of the federal government a viable solution to this problem? It does not seem likely that any such measure will pass congress in the short-term. Perhaps something might be done as part of a comprehensive reform of the entire health care system, but that, too, is many years off.

In the meantime, you often have only one recourse for dealing with nursing home profiteering: a personal injury lawyer who can recoup the money you have paid for housing and care, compensation for treatment of injuries suffered as a result of poor care, and punitive damages that make it unprofitable for companies to run poor-quality nursing homes. Please contact the experienced nursing home neglect attorneys at Pomerantz, Perlberger, and Lewis, LLP today for a free initial consultation. In some cases, time is of the essence, as profiteers can try to use bankruptcy as a shield to cut and run.