Patient advocates push back against proposals to provide nursing homes immunity from liability over coronavirus infection rates, fatalities
The Washington Post (6/8, A1, Cenziper, Whoriskey, Mulcahy, Jacobs, 14.2M) reports on measures being passed in approximately 20 states that have granted “nursing homes immunity from most lawsuits during the coronavirus pandemic,” even if those lawsuits are related to facilities’ alleged negligence in protecting their residents from the coronavirus.”
However, patient advocacy groups and plaintiffs are contesting “not whether immunity should be extended to health-care personnel, but whether those protections should also extend to nursing homes and their owners.” They argue that “troubled facilities” should remain subject to liability litigation.” The Post adds, “Watchdog groups say the industry used the coronavirus emergency to push a longstanding agenda to limit liability and lawsuits,” but “even without immunity, proving how the coronavirus slipped inside a home is difficult, plaintiffs’ lawyers say.
‘This so-called flood of litigation is simply not going to materialize,’ said Robert Sachs, past chairman of the nursing home litigation group at the American Association for Justice. ‘These are going to be very difficult cases to prove on a number of levels. The hurdles are high.’” (AAJ)
Whats happened is just not right…..
One afternoon in early April, Brenda Anagnos crouched in the bushes outside a nursing home in Windsor, Conn., and pressed her face to the window. From outside the locked-down facility, Anagnos said she watched her mother, wearing a red tank top, shiver beneath a hospital sheet. Diagnosed with COVID-19, she could barely raise a hand. Anagnos said she called the front desk for a nurse, a blanket, some help with an electrolyte drink.
Like others with family members in nursing homes, she said she was terrified about what might be happening behind closed doors. Her fears grew the next morning when a family friend peered through the window and took a photograph of Anagnos’s mother, Carol Ballard, 81, lying on the floor in front of a wheelchair. The grandmother of four died the next morning, on April 6, amid one of the deadliest nursing home outbreaks in the country. “She had life left,” Anagnos said. “She didn’t deserve to die like this.”
Anagnos and the bereaved families of other residents want answers from the home, where 47 of its 138 residents have died of covid-19 — more than one in three, according to facility administrators. But exactly what happened at Kimberly Hall North during the chaotic early weeks of the pandemic may never be known.
On the day before Ballard died, isolated from family members, Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont (D) issued an emergency order granting nursing homes immunity from most lawsuits during the coronavirus pandemic.
Anagnos and the bereaved families of other residents want answers from the home, where 47 of its 138 residents have died of covid-19 — more than one in three, according to facility administrators. But exactly what happened at Kimberly Hall North during the chaotic early weeks of the pandemic may never be known. On the day before Ballard died, isolated from family members, Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont (D) issued an emergency order granting nursing homes immunity from most lawsuits during the coronavirus pandemic.
But what plaintiffs’ lawyers and patient advocacy groups contest most is not whether immunity should be extended to health-care personnel, but whether those protections should also extend to nursing homes and their owners. In their view, troubled facilities ought to remain subject to litigation resulting from life-threatening failures in infection control and patient care, and families offered a chance to pierce the layers of secrecy that often surround unexpected or unexplained deaths.
Since the start of the pandemic, more than 30,000 nursing home residents have died of COVID-19, state data shows. Through the discovery process in civil litigation, family members would have an opportunity to obtain medical and company records and the sworn depositions of caregivers and company officials. “The industry seized on this crisis to try to get a get-out-of-jail-free card,” said Steve Levin, a lawyer in Chicago who is working with about 100 nursing home residents and families who plan to file suit in Illinois, despite the state’s immunity order. “I’ve never seen anything like it.” (https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/06/08/nursing-home-immunity-laws/)
The governor’s of these states are shielding nursing homes, trying to make them untouchable, which means they don’t have to be accountable for what happened and that’s not okay.