Guardianship changes on legislators’ table

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. – State lawmakers were told that Florida collects little data on guardianships during a Wednesday committee meeting.

A task force is recommending changes, but there are still large holes in the system.

Doug Franks spent years trying to free his mother from guardianship. He succeeded just weeks before she died.

Franks had tough words this summer when he spoke to the state’s guardianship task force.

“Our legal system is broken. And it rewards people who want to extract money from the elderly. There is no oversight. There is still none,” said Franks.

The House Civil Justice and Property Rights Sub Committee heard from experts Wednesday.

One concern is that Florida does not allow courts in other states to talk with Florida courts.

Elder Law Attorney Victoria Heuler spoke about a hypothetical brother.

“He then starts a guardianship up in Georgia. Because he hates my guts and he wants all mom’s money. Now she’s in Georgia. How do I go in Georgia and get her?” said Heuler.

Also clear from the meeting is that there is no data on who, what, or why people are in guardianship.

There’s also no data on guardians who are taking care of what the law calls a ‘ward’.

“The state doesn’t track guardianships. There’s no database that tells us how many cases of guardianship there are. There’s no data that shows us whether there are guardians who are bad actors,” said Representative Carlos Guillermo Smith.

Recommendations from a statewide guardianship task force include creating databases, asking judges to consider less restrictive measures before guardianship, and more training for everyone involved.

Doug Franks thinks not all the right people were on the task force.

“Law enforcement. That was huge. They needed to be a part of this because it is a criminal enterprise,” said Franks.

And while Franks was able to free his mother, the committee heard that once someone is under guardianship, few are freed, except by death.

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Guardianship changes on legislators’ table

AG Nessel testifies in Lansing, challenging state's guardianship laws: 'We should be ashamed...'

The Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel testified Tuesday in front of a committee in Lansing telling legislators we should be ashamed of how we treat the elderly in our state.

 

By: Heather Catallo

 

LANSING (WXYZ) — The Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel testified Tuesday in front of a committee in Lansing telling legislators we should be ashamed of how we treat the elderly in our state.

 

Members of the Elder Abuse Task Force are trying to get the laws changed to improve Michigan’s flawed guardianship system, which the 7 Investigators have been reporting on for years.

“We should be ashamed of how we treat the elderly in this state.”

“We should be ashamed of how we treat the elderly in this state,” said Nessel during her testimony in front of the Michigan House Judiciary Committee. The attorney general said adult guardianship reforms are not just a good idea – they’re a moral imperative.

“We must remember that guardianship and conservatorships can and do ruin lives,” Nessel added. “Even prisoners, convicted murderers retain more rights than someone under a guardianship.”

The 7 Investigators have been exposing problems in the state’s guardianship system for four years.

Nessel even cited the WXYZ story about Marcie Mitchell’s parents, who were separated from their loved ones by a professional guardian back in 2019.

“The legislation before you today addresses the problems we saw in this case,” Nessel said.

When you’re declared mentally incapacitated by the probate courts and placed under guardianship, you can no longer make your own medical, financial, or legal decisions.

“We do not serve to denigrate those who do the sometimes thankless job of serving as guardians. But we do want a more transparent guardianship system here in Michigan,” said Rep. Graham Filler (R-Dewitt), who is sponsoring some of the bills.

New legislation created by the attorney general’s Elder Abuse Task Force will make it harder for professional guardians to isolate vulnerable adults or cash in on their estates.

“Sometimes we see guardians who misuse resident funds or who won’t provide residents with the most basic things, like underwear or consent for medical treatment,” said State Long-Term Care Ombudsman Salli Pung about people under guardianship in nursing homes and long term care facilities.

The four new bills would change several things, including giving judges more rules to follow to make sure family members get to serve as a guardian, instead of a stranger. The bills would also require more medical documentation before declaring someone incapacitated.

“Under this bill, a court may dismiss a proceeding if it cannot be shown by clear and convincing evidence that the individual is an incapacitated individual,” said Kyra Harris Bolden (D-Southfield), who is also sponsoring some of the legislation.

“They just improve transparency by making everyone knows what the rules are to be determined whether someone is unsuitable to serve,” said Christopher Smith from the State Bar Elder Law & Disability Rights Section.

The Michigan Probate Judges Association is not thrilled with all of the changes, but their president-elect testified that they’re working with the task force to keep tweaking the legislation.

“There are, however, some provisions that we see as problematic to the court process,” said Judge John Tomlinson.

Testimony for the bills was limited by time on Tuesday, but committee members say they will continue to hold hearings and work on these changes to the law over the summer.

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AG Nessel testifies in Lansing, challenging state's guardianship laws: 'We should be ashamed...'

Minnesota elder care reform advocates turn up heat on legislators

Kay Bromelkamp and Anne Sterner

Frustrated by what they see as legislative foot-dragging, family members of abuse victims are intensifying their push for new laws to protect tens of thousands of vulnerable adults who live in senior care facilities across the state.

A grass roots coalition of abuse victims and their relatives, Elder Voice Family Advocates, descended on the State Capitol early Monday and distributed 1,850 summaries of maltreatment reports — including descriptions of beatings, sexual assaults and thefts — to legislators ahead of key hearings this week. The reports represent just a small fraction of the more than 20,000 allegations of maltreatment received by the Minnesota Department of Health each year from individuals and facilities across the state.

The family members said they are trying to combat the perception that abuse occurs only in a minority of senior homes, and want to show through government documents that dangerous incidents are widespread in every legislative district in the state.

The legislative action Monday was the culmination of weeks of data-gathering by the growing army of volunteers at Elder Voice. It's a grass-roots group that has bolted from obscurity over the past year to play a pivotal role in state efforts to reform Minnesota's troubled system for responding to violent crimes and other forms of abuse in senior homes.

Wearing their signature orange clothing, two dozen Elder Voice members fanned out across the Capitol buildings in St. Paul with heavy cardboard boxes filled with maltreatment reports, which they handed out to 150 legislators. The process of reading, sorting and mapping the reports by legislative district took hundreds of volunteer hours, and the printing costs nearly depleted Elder Voice's modest budget.

The project was also an emotional one for Elder Voice's mostly women volunteers, who all have parents or other loved ones who were mistreated in senior facilities. 

"The [senior care] industry keeps saying this is rare," Anne Sterner, an Elder Voice member, said as she handed a pile of reports to state Sen. Tony Lourey, DFL-Kerrick. "It's not rare. It's systemic. And legislators need to take action on a global scale."

In recent weeks, senior advocacy groups such as Elder Voice and Minnesota AARP have grown increasingly concerned that elder care reform efforts are being weakened or delayed by the powerful nursing home lobby, and by incremental proposals that improve consumer protections but leave the existing regulatory system largely intact.

Elder Voice was part of a coalition of senior advocacy groups charged last November by Gov. Mark Dayton to come up with recommendations to improve the safety and care of the state's nearly 2,000 senior homes. Early this year, after weeks of meetings, they produced an ambitious blueprint of reforms. The 58-page report called for a new licensing system for the state's lightly regulated assisted-living industry, greater protections against arbitrary evictions from senior facilities, more stringent criminal sanctions against abusers, and a "private right of action" for lawsuits when vulnerable seniors are abused, among other reforms.

Within weeks, Dayton hailed the report and DFL lawmakers have introduced far-reaching legislation that contain many of its key recommendations, including a plan to require Minnesota's roughly 1,200 assisted-living facilities to be licensed by 2020. Because assisted-living facilities are currently not licensed, they are not subject to regular inspections and their residents do not have the same level of consumer protections as those who live in state-licensed nursing homes, according to an exhaustive report released last month by the state Legislative Auditor.

Despite bipartisan support, the legislation supported by elder care advocates missed the committee deadlines required to advance.

Meanwhile, lawmakers continue to debate more modest proposals that would help protect seniors but would leave the regulatory system in place. A bill being supported by state Senate Republicans, for instance, would strengthen the state's enforcement powers and lift the layers of secrecy that often surround investigations of maltreatment. Yet the proposal stops short of licensing assisted living, and instead would establish a 16-member task force to review state oversight of these facilities.

Kristine Sundberg, president of Elder Voice, said relatives of abuse victims had their expectations raised by talk of systemic reforms, and are growing frustrated by the political process and what they see as legislators' indifference to the surge of elder abuse reports. In 2016, the state Health Department received 25,226 allegations of abuse and neglect in senior care facilities, a sevenfold increase since 2010. Yet only 3 percent of the allegations were investigated by state inspectors on site, according to a Star Tribune investigation.

For now, members of Elder Voice have vowed to persist with their campaign by taking their message directly to lawmakers and pushing to strengthen the bills that remain.

"We don't need more task forces and work groups. That's a delaying tactic," said Sundberg, as she walked through the Capitol with an armful of documents. "When we talk to families of abuse victims ... it's perplexing to them why lawmakers cannot take something seriously that is literally a life and death issue."

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Minnesota elder care reform advocates turn up heat on legislators

Is $370 million in fines right way to stop dementia patient dumping?

Late life by definition deserves dignity and care, even if you don’t really realize you are not receiving either one. For a nursing home to dump an elderly person at a hospital just because they’ve become difficult to manage is a despicable act.

But we’re skeptical that our two freshman Democratic legislators have a good grasp of the solution.

State Rep. LaToya Greenwood, D-East St. Louis, and Rep. Katie Stuart, D-Edwardsville, are sponsors on House Bill 3392. It adds fines for nursing homes that fail to follow staffing levels mandated in a state law passed in 2010. It also gives due process to patients that the nursing homes claim cannot be managed.

By their estimate, about 1,000 patents face the problem in our state of 12.88 million people. If the 2010 law were enforced, there would be 5,463 new jobs in Illinois.

So will adding more than five times the number of low-wage workers ensure those 1,000 difficult patients receive the proper care?

Matt Hartman, vice president of the Illinois Health Care Association, throws a lot of doubt on that. He also sees the bill creating a big state money grab of about $370 million in fines and penalties. That is about a fourth of the state’s Medicaid spending, he said.

He also said the state lawmakers numbers are off, and only about half as many people as they claim are affected.

Any time the state tries to dictate one standard to fit every single nursing home from Chicago to Washington County, there will be large expense to target a limited problem.

Maybe the state lawmakers need to work with the industry to figure out how to prevent patient dumping. Maybe they don’t need to take away 25 cents of every dollar spent on the care for all nursing home residents.

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Is $370 million in fines right way to stop dementia patient dumping?

Bill would require long-term-care facilities to allow cameras that monitor resident care

Jane Casey

The camera that Jane Casey hid in her mother’s assisted living facility may have been against the law, but it put her on a journey to find a way to legally track the care of a vulnerable population.

In 2013, Casey was successful in getting Virginia legislators to pass a law to allow electronic monitoring in nursing homes and assisted-living facilities, if the resident or authorized family member agreed. Casey was disappointed, though, by a clause added during General Assembly negotiations: allowing facilities the option to refuse.

This year Casey returned to ask legislators to toughen the regulation by requiring that nursing homes allow the cameras.

Senate Bill 553, sponsored by Sen. John Cosgrove, R-Chesapeake, sailed through the Senate, and the measure is being considered by the House.

“Unless we get this bill passed, we have nothing,” Casey said. “What we need is for nursing homes not to be able to say no. Until then, people will be neglected.”

The Virginia Health Care Association supports the voluntary regulations that resulted from the 2013 action, but said it has concerns about the mandatory nature of the current bill, citing the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act privacy law.

“The bill as currently drafted raises concerns for us related to its mandatory nature, as well as the practicality of implementation, which raises questions of legal liability, HIPAA compliance, and other privacy issues,” read a statement provided by the organization’s communications department.

Several other states already have these laws, riding a tide of families who want to monitor care of relatives who can’t communicate well due to illness or disease.

Texas was the first to adopt one in 2001. Since then, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Washington and Illinois have passed laws requiring nursing homes to allow residents and their families to place cameras in their rooms. Maryland allows it but doesn’t require that nursing homes agree to a request.

The laws generally make residents and their families responsible for buying, installing and maintaining the equipment. Illinois is the most recent state to pass a law – the governor signed it in August – and also set up a $50,000 public fund to help residents who couldn’t afford the equipment.

Some advocacy groups that have supported the laws say they can act as a deterrent to abuse and neglect. The nursing home industry has concerns, though, about the privacy and dignity of residents, and whether they’re able to consent to the around-the-clock monitoring. The nursing home industry also questioned what the liability would be for facilities and their employees.

Virginia’s regulations require the written consent of the residents, or their authorized representative, and that of roommates, if there are any. Also a sign must be posted outside the room to let staff, caregivers and visitors know about the monitoring.

Casey became interested in monitoring when her mother developed dementia and macular degeneration that impaired her vision. She couldn’t live independently anymore.

Even in high-quality places, Casey often found the care to be substandard. Her mother lived in several retirement communities and assisted-living facilities before moving to Lake Prince Woods in Suffolk in 2009. That’s where Casey bought the surveillance camera hidden in a picture frame. The video she reviewed showed an employee changing her mother’s clothing and linens without appearing to say a word.

When Casey brought that up, along with some other lapses in care to an administrator, she was asked to remove the camera. Casey later moved her mother to a home that she and her husband had built on their property in Suffolk and hired caregivers for when they couldn’t be with her. She died three years later at 96.

The regulations that the 2013 law led to are still in the promulgation stage, according to Erik Bodin, director of the Virginia Department of Health’s office of licensure and certification. State health and executive branch officials are reviewing some final changes, after which the regulations will be posted for a 60-day public comment period, probably in the spring.

He said that if the bill passes, changing the regulations from voluntary to mandatory, that law would go into effect on July 1. The regulations would likely need to be changed shortly after that through a process that takes less time, he said.

Even though the bill is too late to help her mother, Casey believes it will help others in the same situation, who need protection. But even if it passes, there’s another important element: “It depends on whether families want to pay attention.”

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Bill would require long-term-care facilities to allow cameras that monitor resident care