‘It was hell they made me suffer’: Nursing homes are suing caregivers for debt they didn’t owe, regulator says


Eleanor Reyes

Illegal contract clauses can lead to wage garnishment, garnishment of resident family members

Nursing homes and debt collectors are billing and suing family and friends of long-term care residents to demand payment of debts these individuals legally do not owe, say consumer attorneys and debt collectors. Federal regulators claim

In a new report examining institutional debt collection practices, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau found that some nursing home admission contracts include giving caregivers or other third parties personal Under federal law, nursing homes participating in Medicare and Medicaid may make such provisions a condition of admission or continued stay in the facility. you can’t. But some care homes hire debt collectors to collect hundreds of thousands of dollars in unpaid bills for residents from third parties under these invalid provisions, he said. the regulator said.

Family members and friends subject to these acts are often sentenced against them because they are ignorant of the law and do not have the resources to respond to the lawsuit. According to the CFPB, some caregivers who were eligible for payments to care for their loved ones had their wages garnished or even lost their homes.

The CFPB and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services said that when debt collectors attempt to collect bad debts and provide information about those debts to credit bureaus, they may violate federal debt collection and credit reporting laws. warned in a joint letter to the nursing home and the debtor. collector on thursday.

CFPB director Rohit Chopra said in an interview with MarketWatch on Thursday that “medical debt is a huge problem across the board, and I am particularly concerned that health debt on credit reports is often inaccurate. Of the large number of nursing home residents who died during the pandemic, he said caregivers could now be “subject to potentially illegal debt collection.”

The federal government estimates that more than a quarter of adults over the age of 65 will need nursing home care at some point. According to Genworth Financial (GNW), which provides long-term care insurance, the median annual cost of a private room in a nursing home will exceed $100,000 in 2021. Most adults do not have long-term care insurance, and Medicare provides limited care in nursing homes. For low-income residents who have run out of resources, Medicaid can pay for nursing home care, but the application process is often time-consuming. You may be billed.

According to Toby Edelman, the nonprofit’s senior policy attorney, anyone who has lawful access to a resident’s income or resources, such as through a financial power of attorney, will provide payments from those resident resources to the facility. You may be asked to sign a contract to Medicare Advocacy Center. But outside of such scenarios, she said, clauses purporting to hold third parties liable “are not enforceable clauses.”

Responding to the CFPB report, the American Health Care Association/National Center for Assisted Living, trade association for the nursing home industry, said: Stop bad practices. Scott Purcell, CEO of debt collection industry association ACA International, said in a statement that members of the association had “a strong commitment to compliance with contractual and legal obligations when working with reputable creditors.” We have a management system,” he said. The group is unaware of the pattern of abuse in nursing home debt collection practices, he said.

Several individuals who spoke at a virtual CFPB hearing on Thursday said they were embroiled in a long and difficult legal battle over debts they did not owe. In tears, he said, “Hell they stabbed me, I will never see justice.”

Most of the nursing home lawsuits against third parties reviewed by the CFPB involved allegations that residents’ money had been willfully misappropriated, hidden, or stolen. The bureau said it had no sexuality, raising the possibility that it was a “method of coercion.”

In some cases, nursing homes and debt collectors are “manufacturing claims of fraudulent assignments” or sending money to avoid debt, New York attorney Emma Catelin said at a CFPB hearing on Thursday. Stated. “Debt collection law firms and care homes we witnessed are working on a broad and systematic deceptive debt collection scheme to squeeze money out of hundreds of non-debted consumers. .”

The CFPB report didn’t address other legal issues that can trap families in nursing home debt. More than half of the states have “filial piety” laws that can be used to hold adult children accountable for their parents’ unpaid medical bills. These laws generally do not allow a third party, such as a nursing home, to sue for unpaid debts, but for example, an adult child in parental care may sue a sibling for the cost of care. I can do it. Katherine Pearson, professor of law at Pennsylvania State University’s Dickinson School of Law.

But Pennsylvania is one of the states that allows caregivers to bring filial piety cases against adult children or parents, Pearson said. And in 2019, he said, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled that the state’s filial piety law applies to residential care facility claims against out-of-state parents for care provided to their adult sons in Pennsylvania. I went down.

– Eleanor Reyes

 

(Closed) Dow Jones Newswire

09-10-22 1416ET

Copyright (c) 2022 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.



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