Florida law treats seniors worse than dogs

In the aftermath of Hurricane Irma, people were stunned to learn that eight South Florida nursing home residents had literally cooked to death at The Rehabilitation Center in Hollywood Hills. Gov. Rick Scott 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 how this happened.

If a kennel owner mistreated and killed eight 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. It’s unlikely the families of the dead residents will get justice.

Florida has the largest elderly population in the nation, yet nursing home residents get horribly mistreated like this. In most cases, there is no outrage, and no accountability.

Florida law treats its seniors worse than dogs.

The Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations requires accredited hospitals and facilities to maintain functioning emergency generators capable of running the air conditioning and other key systems in the event of a power failure. Florida does not require nursing homes to maintain this basic life-safety feature.

After a newspaper investigation in the 1980s about how Florida nursing homes were horribly mistreating residents with impunity, Florida passed the “Nursing Home Residents’ Rights Act.” However, since the early 1990s, the Legislature has steadily eroded those Residents’ Rights under the guise of “tort reform.”

While the Nursing Home industry lobby was pumping millions of campaign dollars to their causes, Florida’s governors and Legislatures weakened punitive damages, lowered staffing levels, weakened safety regulations, and made it much harder to hold nursing home owners accountable.

Florida is one of the only states in America where you can operate a nursing home with literally no liability insurance at all. 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.

Florida also allows out-of-state shadow Limited Liability Companies to be the owners. Most nursing homes in Florida are owned by a maze of corporate LLC’s. That makes it difficult to determine who is legally responsible when residents get mistreated and killed and to get justice for the victims and their families.

There is no legitimate reason for systematically eroding residents’ rights and allowing out-of-state shadow LLC’s to operate uninsured nursing homes in Florida without basic life-safety features like generators.

The Agency for Healthcare Administration used to be tough on nursing homes that violate minimum standards. Our Governors and Legislature weakened this agency so much that nursing homes rarely get punished. One in five of the state’s nursing homes are on a state “watch list” for substandard care. Many more should be.

Brian Lee was Florida’s LongTerm Care Ombudsman for over a decade. He had a reputation for protecting residents and making sure their families could gather transparent nursing home financial and ownership information. When the Nursing Home Industry did not like what Brian Lee was doing, Gov. Rick Scott fired him in 2011 and replaced him with a long string of short-timers the nursing home industry liked. The fox is now guarding the henhouse. “Unfathomable” indeed.