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| Marisa & Dane Conover |
Second of three parts.
Marisa Conover of Fair Oaks built her career dealing with complicated people and problems. As a former executive with CBS Records International, she handled worldwide distribution of video and merchandising for such artists as Michael Jackson, Barbra Streisand and The Rolling Stones.
Then she encountered a challenge closer to home.
Conover believes that questionable care at a Roseville nursing home – and the injection of a powerful antipsychotic drug – contributed to the death of her mother in December 2012. Genine Zizzo, a 5-foot-1 widow who had lived in the same Orangevale home for 50 years, died at age 82 following a 10-day stay at Roseville Point Health & Wellness Center.
Conover filed a complaint with the state through a Sacramento-based advocacy group. She researched the controversial use of “chemical restraints” in nursing homes to subdue and control patients. She gathered her mother’s medical records and coroner’s reports, highlighting in yellow the apparent inconsistencies and contradictions.
But when Conover began poking around the Internet to research the ownership history of Roseville Point, she hit a wall.
Despite her business acumen, she gleaned surprisingly little about the individuals behind the 98-bed nursing home on Sunrise Avenue.
“Who are these people?” asked Conover, 56, nearly two years after her mother’s death.
Conover had bumped up against one of the most complicated ownership groups in the state.
As it turns out, Roseville Point is part of Shlomo Rechnitz’s expanding universe of homes across California.
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| Shlomo Rechnitz |
Consumers would be hard-pressed to know that – or even to link Rechnitz to any particular nursing home using the state’s website. Some of the state’s leading elder-care advocates said they had never heard of Rechnitz or his principal company, Brius Healthcare Services.
Rechnitz’s history in California is a case study in the evolving nature of nursing-home ownership, and the complexity of the industry’s corporate structures. As private investment groups scoop up an ever-larger share of the nation’s skilled-nursing care market, it has become increasingly difficult to decipher who owns the nation’s largest chains.
Elder-care advocates will tell you this is no accident: A convoluted ownership structure, they say, is a way for owners to hide assets and shield themselves from civil and criminal liability when patients are abused or neglected in their care. Confusing lines of ownership also make it harder for regulators to detect worrisome patterns of care among facilities within a chain.
Congress felt so strongly about improving nursing-home transparency that the Affordable Care Act now includes strict new reporting requirements for owners. But the government’s ability to untangle the ownership web has been slow and inconsistent.
A 1997 California law requires state officials to make detailed ownership information publicly available, but the state’s health facilities website continues to provide scant and often misleading information.
Full Article & Source:
Unmasked: Who owns California’s nursing homes?
See Also:
Unmasked: How California’s largest nursing home chains perform
This is a great series and I take my hat off to the Sacramento Bee for taking it on.
ReplyDeleteKeep digging Sacramento Bee for conflict of interest hidden under layers of muck.
ReplyDeleteIt's there but it takes federal agencies to garner the army needed to get to the truth of who is benefiting, profiting.
All by design to keep we the little chump people in the dark easier to get blindsided when the situation hits your house.
Who will we find under the layers of muck?
Judges? Elected politicians? Team Guardianship? GALs? Physicians? The list of players is long.
I agree with Marisa Conover - who are these people?
“Who are these people?” asked Conover, 56, nearly two years after her mother’s death.
Conover had bumped up against one of the most complicated ownership groups in the state.