Georgia Nursing Home Abuse & Negligence Cases

For Georgia lawyers handling nursing home abuse and negligence cases, we are seeing new litigation hurdles to overcome. Nursing home owners are creating new corporate structures to disguise the actual ownership of the nursing homes. It is a “corporate shell game” where the actual owners set up holding corporations to avoid responsibility. If you look at the way the facility is established, there will be a contractual relationship between a management company and a nursing home, where the same human being is on both sides of the contract and the management company is being paid a disproportionately high amount of money compared to its services. Another common scenario is for an owner to set up a real estate investment trust that leases real estate to the nursing home at rates that sometimes exceed the entire value of the property. A separate LLC holds the nursing home license, but the owner sucks all of the money out the facility via management fees or rent so that there is no money in the corporation that owns the license.
Another scenario that we are seeing is that owners of nursing homes are electing not to insure the nursing home to make it appear that they are “judgment proof” and to discourage claims. This significantly increases the amount of work involved in a case to ferret out the corporate assets of the nursing home but it can be done.
Fortunately, there are a number of legislative developments in the nursing home area. The Nursing Home Arbitration Act which would ban pre-dispute mandatory arbitration agreements in nursing home contracts, recently passed Committees in both Houses of Congress. Another recently introduced bill, The Nursing Home Transparency and Quality of Care Improvement Act, HR7128, would improve reporting and transparency of nursing home ownership.