Bill Lueders
At 97, Elaine Benz was evicted from the senior facility where she had lived for 10 years.
In late October, my 97-year-old mother, Elaine Benz, was evicted from the senior care facility where she had lived for 10 years. It happened from one day to the next, in an apparent violation of state law. The Regency New Berlin, in Waukesha County, decided that she had become too much work.
Facilities in the Regency’s licensing category are required by state administrative code to give residents and their families 30 days advance notice before they can forcibly discharge a resident, and even then only for certain reasons. In our case, we received no such notice and believe the stated reasons for Elaine’s eviction are bogus.
The Regency, owned by a Waukesha-based “not-for-profit” called ProHealth Care (it’s paid its CEO, Susan Edwards, nearly $19 million in just the last six years), argues that no advance notice was needed because Elaine posed “an immediate documented threat to the health and safety of the resident or others,” as if she were running around with nunchucks. It claimed she needed more than the licensing category’s required maximum of 28 hours of direct care per week — a much greater level of attention than she has ever received (more like eight hours a week).
Here’s what happened: Elaine ended up in a physical rehabilitation facility after a fall. She was supposed to return home on the morning of Friday, Oct. 29. On the afternoon of Oct. 28, the Regency told my sister, Diane, that our mom would not be allowed back. For 19 more days she remained stranded at the rehab center, during a time it was in a COVID lockdown.
I filed a grievance with the Wisconsin Department of Health Services, refuting the Regency’s claims. I noted that “there is a reason, and a good one at that,” for requiring 30 days advance notice. “It’s to prevent providers from putting families in the predicament that ProHealth Regency has put us.”
On Nov. 8, Geralyn Spitzer of DHS’s Division of Quality Assurance conducted an unannounced visit to the Regency to gather information on this case, turning in her report about two days later.
We moved mom into a new facility on Nov. 17. The next day, I was told by Spitzer’s supervisor, Hillary Holman, that there “absolutely” would be an enforcement action taken by the state. She said, “In this case, they’ll be put on notice that a violation occurred. They’ll be charged fines.” She predicted this would happen around mid-December. It didn’t.
I learned several weeks ago that the division was still investigating, but no one from my family has been asked for additional information. Even if the state does ultimately take enforcement action, I think it will likely be too little to serve as a deterrent, and of course far too late to prevent what took place. (In response to my request for all discharge-related enforcement actions since Jan. 1, 2019, the state provided two cases in which violations were found; one violator was fined $700, the other $300.)
Moreover, I suspect that while we were kept in the dark, representatives of the Regency and ProHealth Care were in the loop, perhaps minimizing the consequences they will face. I am now seeking to obtain Spitzer’s submitted report, as well as records of communications between the Division of Quality Assurance and the people who kicked my mom out.
Sadly, as I learned in researching a long article on this and other elder evictions that appears in the new issue of The Progressive, what happened to my mother is not the least bit unusual.
In mid-November, the Office of Inspector General for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services released a major report on “facility-initiated discharges” from nursing homes and other long-term care facilities. It noted that these have for years been the single most frequent complaint received by the federal Long-Term Care Ombudsman Program, which works to resolve problems for individuals living in these facilities. More than 13,000 discharge-related complaints were received in 2019.
In one case cited in the report, “police found one resident on the streets after a nursing home discharged him to an unlicensed boarding house without notifying his family.” An attorney with the Michigan Elder Justice Initiative told me her group has seen cases in which elderly residents were approved for discharges to a homeless shelter and to a house that had burned down. Advocates say evictions often occur when a resident gets sent outside the facility for medical reasons, as happened with my mom.
“It is rare for a resident to ever get 30 days’ notice,” says Tony Chicotel, a staff attorney for California Advocates for Nursing Home Reform. That’s because doing so informs residents of their right to appeal; the facilities don’t want residents to know this because, when they do appeal, they usually win. As Chicotel puts it, “The benefits of breaking the law are greater than the cost of breaking the law. So, consequently, you get a lot of law-breaking.”
How nice it would be for Wisconsin to not go along with this, and instead take seriously its responsibility to protect its most vulnerable citizens. State officials should be delivering swift consequences to violators, including the “significant financial penalties” Chicotel says are needed when facilities break the law. Is there a legislator somewhere who might want to look into this?
Please read my investigative feature article, “I Want to Go Home,” on The Progressive’s website or as a downloadable PDF. If you think it’s worthwhile, pass it on. Perhaps together we can build some momentum toward putting an end to this dreadful practice.
Bill Lueders, news editor of Isthmus from 1986 to 2011, is editor of The Progressive.
