CANHR is sponsoring or co-sponsoring the following bills for the 2016 legislative session.
Sponsored
SB 33 (Hernandez): Medi-Cal Recovery Reform
This bill would limit Medi-Cal recovery for those who are 55+ years of age to only what is required by federal law, and eliminate optional recovery for other services; eliminate recovery on surviving spouses’ estates; allow hardship exemptions for homesteads of modest value. SB 33 is co-sponsored by Western Center on Law and Poverty.
Status: SB 33 is pending on the Assembly floor..
SB 924 (Roth): Insurance: Annuity Transactions
Under existing law insurance companies must comply with specific requirements regarding the purchase, exchange, or replacement of an annuity recommended to a senior consumer. The insurance company must have reasonable grounds to believe that the annuity transaction would be suitable for the senior based on certain information including: age, annual income, and whether the consumer has a reverse mortgage. This bill would add the requirement that an insurance company ascertain whether the purchase of an annuity is connected to an attempt to qualify for a government benefit. If a senior is trying to qualify for a government benefit, then the insurance company must determine whether or not it is a suitable transaction. Status: SB 924 has been referred to the Senate Committee on Insurance.
SB 938 (Jackson): Ensuring Appropriate Care for Conservatees with Dementia
This bill would help ensure appropriate care for people with dementia who are conserved. It requires greater detail from a conservatee’s treating health care provider to demonstrate that a proposed psychotropic drug prescription is appropriate and the least intrusive treatment alternative before a court can approve the use of psychotropic drugs for a conservatee with dementia. The bill also updates the definition of dementia to reflect the latest Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) classification of “major neurocognitive disorders.” Status: SB 938 has been referred to the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Please send letters of support to:
Senate Judiciary Committee
State Capitol,
Room 2187
Sacramento, CA 95814
Fax: (916) 445-8390
CANHR Support
AB 1655 (Dodd): Medi-Cal: personal needs allowance
This bill would increase the personal needs allowance for Medi-Cal beneficiaries in skilled nursing facilities from $35 to $80 per month, and would require the department to annually increase this amount based on the percentage increase in the California Consumer Price Index. Status: Referred to Assembly Committee on Health.
SB 939 (Monning): CCRC Refunds
This bill would require the continuing care retirement facility to pay the full lump-sum payment that is conditioned upon resale of a unit to the resident within 14 days after resale of the unit and would require the CCRC, for contracts signed after January 1, 2016, to pay at least 20% of the full lump-sum payment to the resident within 120 days after a formerly occupied unit has been vacated. Among other provisions, the bill would require the facility to make the lump-sum payment to the resident’s estate if the resident is deceased.
Status: Senate Human Services
Oppose
AB 1779 (Gatto): Nonprobate transfers: revocable transfer on death deed
Existing law creates the revocable transfer on death deed (revocable TOD deed), which can transfer real property on the death of its owner without a probate proceeding. AB 1779 would clarify that a beneficiary of a TOD may include an entity such as a trust. CANHR opposes the TOD, which is an instrument that will likely make many elders even more susceptible to undue influence and elder abuse. These deeds are subject to estate recovery, which means that the low-income elders who are likely to execute TODs in lieu of hiring an attorney, will also be more likely to be on Medi-Cal and thus subject their estates to recovery. CANHR opposes this bill unless amended to specifically exclude TODs from the beneficiary’s recoverable estate.
Status: SB 1779 has been referred to the Assembly Judiciary Committee.
For details on specific bills, go to: www.leginfo.ca.gov
Source:
CANHR (California Advocates for Nursing Home Reform)
California's AB937, introduced by Assembly Member Bob Wieckowski,codifies basic personal rights for the state’s most vulnerable citizens. The right to have visitors, the right to receive phone calls, and the right to receive mail are already part of California law. However, these personal rights are often violated by court appointed conservators seeking unbridled power over vulnerable individuals.
A lawsuit filed by CANHR against the Department of Public Health and Country
Villa Service Corp, challenges the state-approved practice of allowing Country
Villa nursing homes to contract out their operations to another entity owned by
Country Villa. 
Nearly 25 percent of the residents in California's nursing homes are placed on antipsychotic drugs, often used as sort of a chemical leash to control behavior in a trend a watchdog called an epidemic Thursday at a symposium.
Anthony Chicotel, an attorney with the California Advocates for Nursing Home Reform, said there are appropriate uses of the medication, such as when a patient has illnesses like schizophrenia. But Medicare statistics from the second quarter of last year showed 24.2 percent of the residents in the state's nursing homes were on antipsychotics. Medicare statistics from 2009 showed the use of the medication fluctuated greatly at different Ventura County nursing homes — from a low of 7 percent of the patients on the drugs seven days over one week to a high of about 30.6 percent.
Untreated bed sores and infections, residents left for hours lying in their own waste, a resident with maggots in a festering rectal wound. Despite a generation’s worth of state and federal laws to guarantee a satisfactory standard of care in California nursing homes, an alarming number of facilities are failing to deliver decent humane care to their residents. This is the takeaway from CANHR’s hair-raising review of fourteen reports from California’s Operation Guardians, a project of the state Department of Justice’s Bureau of Medi-Cal Fraud and Elder Abuse. The reports reveal a shameful state of affairs in the reviewed nursing homes that is fostered, in part, by a lack of statewide enforcement from the Department of Public Health (DPH).
Psychotropic drugs were used to control residents who didn't need them at a Kern Valley Healthcare District center, complaint alleges. Three people died.
CANHR is pleased to announce the release of "Toxic Medicine: What You Should Know to Fight the Misuse of Psychoactive Drugs in Nursing Homes." 
