A business that operated a Concord nursing home has settled for $2.3 million with the Department of Justice over allegations that it submitted false medical billing claims and offered “grossly” substandard nursing home services, U.S. Attorney Stephanie M. Hinds announced on Tuesday.
Tranquility Incorporated did business in Concord as the San Miguel Villa, a 190-bed assisted care facility.
The DOJ alleges that from 2012 to 2017, San Miguel submitted, or caused to be submitted, claims to the Medicare and Medi-Cal programs for payments of its services that failed to meet minimum required standards of skilled nursing care in multiple ways.
The government alleges that San Miguel overmedicated its residents with psychotropic drugs, had an excessive amount of resident falls and that residents experienced other mental and physical harm. The DOJ also alleges that residents were exposed to resident-on-resident altercations as well.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta hailed the settlement on Tuesday, calling out San Miguel for allegedly being understaffed, rendering the number of its services “useless.”
“Corporate profits should never be placed above patients needs and care,” said Bonta in a statement.
Bonta’s office said that in June of 2017, the DOJ’s Medi-Cal Fraud and Elder Abuse division responded to a report involving allegations of overmedication of people living at San Miguel. Due to understaffing, the DOJ alleges that San Miguel overmedicated residents to render them “more manageable.”
Tranquility Incorporated could not immediately be reached for comment.
Well that’s gross! This place was caught. How many others are doing this that are getting away with it. Dose it all come down to greed?
It is Standard Operating Procedures there (and other nursing homes) to start newly admitted patients on Anti-depressants/tranquilizers~~”here-take this!”~~Even before they are made “comfortable” in their new 6’x8′ curtained-off piece of the world.
No one wants to be in a nursing home… not even the occasional on-duty RN shift-nurse, and certainly not the nurse aides. Delivered flowers there in 1987– boxes and mop buckets lining the halls alongside patients in chairs who smelled of urine. Visited a neighbor in 1995… everything there had gone “downhill from bad to gross” including the grubby, rude staff. Over the years I’ve had to visit in a few nursing homes. That place has always been possibly the dirtiest, saddest most poorly staffed one in this area.
Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t see how the State of California has any right to collect $2.3 million off of the suffering of the patients who were housed in these facilities. It seems to me that a certain amount of that money should go to compensate the people who did the suffering. Sounds like a racket to me.
I should clarify that I am glad the State of California has oversight of these facilities to prevent the mistreatment of patients. I do, however, feel patients should be compensated for their suffering beyond what the State is collecting as a penalty.