George Bush has been out of office for over a month, but we are still uncovering new damage he has done to our nation. In Tuesday's Washington Post, Cindy Skrzycki reports about the latest discovery of new rule changes that the Bush administration Health and Human Services Department quietly enacted back in September that will make it much harder for consumers to sue nursing homes.
The change, which affects the $144 billion nursing-home industry, was enacted with no public notice or attention.
"This is pretty stunning," said Mark Kosieradzki, a plaintiff attorney in Plymouth, Minn. "Nobody was told. It was just done."
The rule designates state inspectors and Medicare and Medicaid contractors as federal employees, a group usually shielded from providing evidence for either side in private litigation.
The restrictions affect about 16,000 nursing facilities and 3 million residents in the United States. The practical effect is to force litigants to go to greater lengths, including seeking court orders, to get inspection reports or depositions for cases they are pursuing or defending.
"This change hurts nursing-home residents and their families by allowing bad practices to be kept in secret by nursing homes and inspectors," said Eric M. Carlson, an attorney with the National Senior Citizens Law Center in Los Angeles. "Government inspectors have the right to go into nursing homes and investigate, and they learn things that residents and families otherwise could never find out."
On Bloomberg.com, more details are given about the effect of this terrible new ruling:
More than 90 percent of U.S. nursing homes in each of the previous three years were cited for violating federal standards, according to a report in September by the inspector general of the U.S. Health and Human Services Department.
The new rule was issued in September by the department. It generally prohibits state health departments and contractors that do auditing and other services for the government from participating in private lawsuits involving facilities that are in the federal assistance program without approval by the head of HHS.
The effect of the directives has started to play out in the nation's courtrooms. Requests for information, once fairly routine, now are stalled between state and federal officials.
"This regulation update was in the works for a very long time," said department spokesman Bill Hall, in an e-mail.
I'm sure the enactment, at the end of the Bush administration, was just a coincidence!
The complete story is here and here |
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