EDITORIAL: These long-term care facilities only care for the bottom line

May 13--Can you really call it long-term care if the caregivers just give up when it gets difficult?

It has become common practice for nursing homes to get rid of "trouble residents" by evicting them. A report by the Long-Term Care Ombudsman Program in 2014 shows eviction rates have gone up 57 percent since 2000. That same organization recorded 11,331 such cases in 2014, by far the largest grievance against nursing homes across the country.

Doing so allows the typically thinly stretched nursing home staffs to focus more of their time and energy taking care of the "easy residents."

Federal law is supposed to restrict the ability of nursing homes to evict residents but, as is usually the case, there are ways such protections can be circumvented. The law allows for residents to be transferred for a variety of reasons, among them failure to pay for services, posing a risk to others, if the nursing home can no longer provide the necessary services or in cases where the resident is hospitalized for more than a week.

A Sacramento-based nursing home used two of those reasons to give the boot to 55-year-old Bruce Anderson, who suffers from severe brain injury, according to an NPR story from February.

Anderson was sent to the hospital -- by the nursing home -- for treatment for pneumonia. Then the nursing home refused to readmit him once he was well again, claiming he was combative and a danger to staff and other residents, this despite never having reported such behavior about him in the past.

It's more likely that Anderson is too costly, said Tony Chicotel, an attorney with California Advocates for Nursing Home Reform. He said residents like Anderson -- on Medicaid, which pays less than Medicare or private insurance, and who require more attention than others, generally due either to brain injury or dementia -- are considered undesirable because of the labor costs associated with their care.

Twisting federal laws meant to protect residents from undue eviction is a gross abuse of the responsibilities nursing homes are charged with. Better oversight and harsher penalties for such tactics are clearly necessary.

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