Lawsuits renew attention on Shlomo Rechnitz’s nursing homes – CalMatters

from Jocelyn WienerCalMatters

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The chain of California nursing homes owned by Shlomo Rechnitz and his companies has been under state scrutiny for years. Now, a series of recent lawsuits is drawing attention back to his companies.

Senior care advocates say Rechnitz’s companies are Exhibit A of how regulators at the Department of Public Health are failing some of California’s most vulnerable citizens.

In 2021 a CalMatters investigation documents that the state Department of Public Health allowed Rechnitz and his companies to operate 18 nursing homes while delaying licensing decisions for them. The state kept license applications in a “pending” state for seven years after he acquired them. Rechnitz and his companies were allowed to continue operating five additional homes even after the state denied their licenses.

Governor Gavin Newsom signed a law intended to solve the problem, but state regulators in 2023 granted Rechnitz’s companies licenses to operate the homes just before the measure took effect.

Here are the key takeaways from CalMatters’ latest coverage:

Newly licensed homes are now subject to lawsuits from patients

Several homes that received licenses in 2023 are now being sued by patients and their family members.

In February 2024, a Los Angeles County jury received $2.34 million of an 84-year-old nursing home resident named Betsy Jentz, finding that Country Villa Wilshire had violated her rights on 132 occasions, sometimes resulting in serious injuries.

Next February, a Shasta County jury is scheduled to hear a case against Windsor Redding, who is accused of negligence in the 2020 COVID-19 deaths of 24 patients.

Another pending case involves 78-year-old Barbara Pendley, who is said to have died after suffering from severe dehydration at North Point Healthcare & Wellness Center in Fresno.

The trial is scheduled to begin next spring in the case of a 79-year-old dementia patient called Cheryl Doewho was he was allegedly raped twice at Windsor Healthcare Center in Oakland; a second lawsuit against the same facility claims that excessive sedation at the age of 64 Alan Williams led to his death.

Rechnitz and his companies have denied the charges in all of those cases.

“It’s true that nursing homes are the target of abusive lawsuits that do nothing but deplete patient care resources,” said Mark Johnson, an attorney for the facilities and their holding company, Brius.

More citations on average in homes in Rechnitz

A CalMatters analysis of data from both state health department and on federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services found 78 facilities in California that listed Shlomo Rechnitz or his wife Tamar as owners. On average, facilities performed poorly on several key quality indicators compared to the state as a whole.

• Over the past three years, those 78 nursing homes received an average of 12.4 citations for facility-reported incidents, compared to 6.1 for all nursing homes in the state.
• A higher share of facilities received a federal fine in the past three years than the state’s overall rate. Two-thirds of those facilities have received at least one federal fine in the past three years, compared to half of all facilities in the state.
• Facilities were fined an average of $47,897 over the past three years, compared to an average of $29,573 for all California facilities.

Johnson, the attorney for the Rechnitz facilities, said in his email that a large percentage of those facilities are located in Los Angeles County, which issues deficiencies at a higher rate than any county in California, many of which have been overturned on appeal.

He also said that “Mr. Rechnitz’s facilities are self-reported at a significantly higher rate than other comparable facilities,” which in turn may cause them to have a higher number of deficiencies.

Rechnitz is rich

In August 2024, an Alameda County jury found that Alameda Healthcare & Wellness violated the rights of 71-year-old James Dougherty, Sr. more than 1400 times. That included seven instances where staff failed to transport him, causing him to miss chemotherapy, court documents said. Doherty died after developing a large decubitus wound. His family received $7.6 million.

Another key revelation from this case: Rechnitz and his wife revealed their net worth. According to financial documents filed in court totaled $786 million.

Tony Chicotel, senior staff attorney for California Advocates for Nursing Home Reform, said the dollar figure has not been publicly disclosed until now.

“In at least some of these chains, the money intended for patient care is being taken away and sent up the property,” he said.

Advocates say the state isn’t doing its job

Senior care advocates say the state Department of Public Health could push for greater accountability, including withholding licenses from owners they deem bad actors.

Wendy York, a Sacramento attorney specializing in nursing home abuse, said watching elderly and disabled residents repeatedly suffer the same types of injuries in these facilities “feels like a broken record. It feels like Groundhog Day.”

There are “government agencies that are responsible for their oversight,” York said, but “at the end of the day, it looks like we’re the ones doing the enforcement.”

Department of Public Health spokesman Mark Smith said in an emailed statement that the department “remains committed to transparency and accountability for all providers and the health and safety of all California nursing home residents.”

This article was originally published on CalMatters and is republished under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives license.