Homeostasis: Health Care Law Blog
The National Nursing Home Initiative: New DOJ Taskforce Bolsters Nursing Home Enforcement
Subscribe to this blog's feed
Follow us on Facebook
Follow us on TwitterContributors
Recent Posts
- Long Term Care Facilities Should Prepare for County Investigations Into COVID Deaths
- OIG Puts Telehealth in its Crosshairs
- Healthcare Providers Must Remain Vigilant with ADA Service Animal Requirements
- The Ten Year Wait is Over: HRSA Releases 340B Dispute Resolution Final Rule
- HHS Final Rules Modernize the Stark Law and Anti-Kickback Statute to Usher in Value-Based Care
- The CDC’s New Definition of “Close Contact”: What You Need To Know
- U.S. Department of Labor Issues Revised Regulations Implementing FFCRA Leaves Following New York Court’s Decision
- Michigan Reinstitutes Pre-COVID Scope of Practice, Licensure, and Liability Standards
- DHHS Issues Terms and Conditions for Relief Funds
- Nursing Home Compliance Under the COVID-19 Microscope
Related Practices
- Ambulatory Care Providers
- Bankruptcy, Insolvency & Creditors' Rights
- Bioethics & End-of-Life Care
- Biotechnology and Life Science
- Cannabis Law
- Government Investigations and Corporate Compliance
- Health Care
- Health Care Administrative Law & Regulatory Appeals
- HIPAA—Health Information Privacy & Security
- Hospitals and Health Care Systems
- Long-Term & Post-Acute Care Providers
- Nonprofits & Tax-Exempt Organizations
- Pharmacies, DEA & Robinson-Patman/340B Drug Programs
- Physicians, Dentists and Non-Physician Practitioners
Related Industries
The National Nursing Home Initiative: New DOJ Taskforce Bolsters Nursing Home Enforcement
On March 3, 2020, Attorney General William Barr announced the National Nursing Home Initiative–a new U.S. Department of Justice (“DOJ”) taskforce organized to push criminal and civil enforcement action against nursing homes across the country. The initiative will help coordinate DOJ enforcement actions against nursing homes that provide “grossly substandard care.”
The National Nursing Home Initiative has already begun investigating approximately thirty nursing facilities across nine states.
The DOJ emphasized it will target nursing homes that “consistently fail to provide adequate nursing staff to care for their residents, fail to adhere to basic protocols of hygiene and infection control, fail to provide their residents with enough food to eat so that they become emaciated and weak, withhold pain medication, or use physical or chemical restraints to restrain or otherwise sedate their residents.”[1]
DOJ penalties can be severe. A Georgia nursing home operator was sentenced to 20 years in prison in 2012 for health care fraud. The nursing home conditions were “appalling” and “horrendous” according to a Georgia state surveyor, where food shortages bordered on starvation, the facility was consistently understaffed, and insects infested the nursing home. Medicare and Medicaid fraud by nursing homes totaled almost $33 million over three years.
To sign up for Dykema’s Health Care Blog e-mail updates, please click here.
[1] Department of Justice Launches a National Nursing Home Initiative, (2020), https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/department-justice-launches-national-nursing-home-initiative (last visited March 6, 2020).