This PISSES ME OFF bigtime! What a sorry world we live in!

Nursing Home Chain Is Fined for Negligence
Pleasant Care Corp. will pay $1.3 million to settle a lawsuit brought by Atty. Gen. Bill Lockyer in a crackdown on patient-care violations.
By Rong-Gong Lin II, Times Staff Writer
March 9, 2006


California's second-largest nursing home chain agreed Wednesday to pay $1.3 million to the state to settle civil allegations that it provided negligent care to scores of frail patients, including two who died.

The agreement resolved a lawsuit against Pleasant Care Corp., a La Cañada Flintridge firm that owns 30 nursing homes in California, 10 of them in Los Angeles County. It marked a victory in state Atty. Gen. Bill Lockyer's effort to aggressively penalize negligent nursing home operators, a tactic previous state prosecutors have not used. The settlement came in the third major legal action taken by Lockyer's office against a large nursing home chain since he took office in 1999.


The suit accused Pleasant Care of a "pattern of poor quality of care that we found permeated their operations statewide," said Collin Wong-Martinusen, who directs Lockyer's Bureau of Medi-Cal Fraud and Elder Abuse. The case was lodged under the state Unfair Business Practices Act.

"Our investigation revealed that Pleasant Care Corp. grossly failed to fulfill their patient stewardship responsibility, and as a result, some of the defendants' patients suffered needless harm," he said. MORE...

http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/california/la-me-nurse9mar09,1,4183202.story?coll=la-headlines-pe-california

The people who dumped these old folks out on the mean assed streets in California, should be charged with murder one, instead of being fined! I guess the old folks they dumped couldn't pay anymore.

care about people.

Welcome to the United Corporate States of What Used to be America.

Redstone

Anyone who would dump someone like those old folks out on the streets in LA should be gassed by Arnolds SS!

Los Angeles City Attorney's Office Warns Hospitals of Patient-Dumping Investigation

December 22, 2005

The Los Angeles city attorney's office on Thursday will send letters to hospitals in the city warning them of an investigation into allegations that area hospitals routinely transport some discharged patients to downtown Los Angeles, the Los Angeles Times reports. The investigation comes after a Los Angeles Police Department report last month named several area hospitals that take patients downtown.

The city's attorney office will review records at the Union Rescue Mission and other social service agencies in the area to examine the circumstances in which discharged patients are being left.

Hospitals maintain they drop off only patients who are healthy enough to be discharged. However, LAPD officers say they often see people with hospital wristbands who appear ill and sometimes wearing colostomy bags on the streets of downtown Los Angeles.


Possible Criminal Charges
City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo on Wednesday said the investigation could lead to criminal charges or lawsuits if it is found that patients have been taken downtown against their will. MORE...

http://www.californiahealthline.org/index.cfm?Action=dspItem&itemID=117759

Probably Compassionate Conservative CEOs doing the thinking behind this kind of thing...

Nursing Homes

Overview of Representative Henry A. Waxman's Efforts

To Improve Nursing Home Conditions


Rep. Waxman has been a champion of nursing home reform for more than two decades. He believes that our most vulnerable citizens -- the elderly and the disabled who live in nursing homes -- deserve to be treated with dignity and compassion and are entitled to high quality health care. Rep. Waxman has worked to enrich the quality of life for nursing home residents, to strengthen nursing home regulations, to protect against the impoverishment of spouses of nursing home residents, and to increase access to long-term care for all seniors.

2003-Present: Focusing on Safety and Staffing

Rep. Waxman's continuing work on this issue has focused on the safety of nursing home residents and on his concerns regarding staffing. In 2004, Rep. Waxman requested that GAO study the growing problem of sex offenders and prisoners being housed in nursing homes, in some cases resulting in physical and sexual abuse of senior citizens. He also contacted HHS about its recent admission that nursing home staffing level data is unreliable – data that nonetheless remained posted on the HHS website for families to use to make nursing home decisions.

Additionally, a 2003 report released by Rep. Waxman found that the vast majority of nursing homes in Los Angeles County continue to violate federal health standards. MOre...

http://www.house.gov/waxman/issues/health/issues_health_nursing_homes.htm

of its elderly and young. The US fails on both accounts.

compassionless, "faith based" brutality.

Edit...I saw a video of one of the old folks they had dropped, like I wouldn't do to an animal, walking aimlessly along the LA streets and I couldn't get the picture out of my head when I laid down to go to sleep. AMERICA is BADLY broken!

how you take care of the least amongst to you...

It's evident he foresaw Bush and the new republicans.

said during campaign 2004..."The Republicans “are pretty good at raising the Bible, pointing the Bible at us,” said Roberts. “But you know what we do in the Democratic Party? We open it up and see what it says.”

http://www.pww.org/article/view/5747/1/231

He was exactly right.

I think the Republicans are having a hard time trying to cast themselves as Christians anymore. The words are there but the Christian works are missing.

I'd love to see him run for a seat in congress!