Nursing Home Chain Is Fined for Negligence
Pleasant Care Corp. will pay $1.3 million to settle a lawsuit brought by Atty. Gen. Bill Lockyer in a crackdown on patient-care violations.
By Rong-Gong Lin II, Times Staff Writer
March 9, 2006
California's second-largest nursing home chain agreed Wednesday to pay $1.3 million to the state to settle civil allegations that it provided negligent care to scores of frail patients, including two who died.
The agreement resolved a lawsuit against Pleasant Care Corp., a La Cañada Flintridge firm that owns 30 nursing homes in California, 10 of them in Los Angeles County. It marked a victory in state Atty. Gen. Bill Lockyer's effort to aggressively penalize negligent nursing home operators, a tactic previous state prosecutors have not used. The settlement came in the third major legal action taken by Lockyer's office against a large nursing home chain since he took office in 1999.
The suit accused Pleasant Care of a "pattern of poor quality of care that we found permeated their operations statewide," said Collin Wong-Martinusen, who directs Lockyer's Bureau of Medi-Cal Fraud and Elder Abuse. The case was lodged under the state Unfair Business Practices Act.
"Our investigation revealed that Pleasant Care Corp. grossly failed to fulfill their patient stewardship responsibility, and as a result, some of the defendants' patients suffered needless harm," he said. MORE...
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/california/la-me-nurse9mar09,1,4183202.story?coll=la-headlines-pe-californiaThe people who dumped these old folks out on the mean assed streets in California, should be charged with murder one, instead of being fined! I guess the old folks they dumped couldn't pay anymore.