Alternate routes to obtain restitution from nursing homes with insufficient insurance
According to the National Center on Elder Abuse, 2003 saw at least 20,000 complaints being made to state long-term-care ombudsmen agencies alleging nursing home abuse, neglect or exploitation against nursing home residents, and which resulted in investigations. Despite the fact nursing home facilities typically try to claim that their insurance premiums are skyrocketing due to frivolous personal injury claims, the Center for Medicare Advocacy actually revealed that the vast majority of cases it reviews alleging nursing home abuse or neglect arise out of instances involving serious injuries and, even more tragically, deaths.
Our St. Louis personal injury law firm is all-too-familiar with companies that carry too little liability insurance coverage and make it difficult for plaintiffs who have been awarded financial damages, often including pain and suffering compensation, to collect the money to which they are entitled.
Some nursing homes may have insufficient insurance policies because they are operating on a very narrow profit margin, but a large number of nursing homes make the deliberate choice to carry little or no insurance coverage to discourage deserving plaintiffs from filing nursing home abuse or neglect lawsuits in a Missouri or Illinois civil court of law.
The good news is that there are often alternative routes to obtain the financial restitution that victims of nursing home abuse and neglect rightfully deserve. The families of these victims who are seeking to hold a nursing home responsible for its negligence should not allow a lack of insurance to dishearten them. We are experienced in seeking out other avenues of collecting damages which have been awarded in a successful civil lawsuit to make sure our clients receive the money they deserve.
Some of the tactics which certain nursing homes engage in to avoid paying out damages in a nursing home abuse or neglect case include:
• Use of “pass-through” corporations to own the nursing home’s physical building and additional big-ticket assets, with a second corporation owning the nursing home as a business entity;
• Engaging in “creative accounting” practices to paint a picture of the nursing home earning a very small, or even nonexistent, profit;
• Deliberately carrying a minimal amount of insurance, such as an aggregate policy which might limit all claims in a one-year period to a relatively small figure, like $1 million; meaning that no matter how many separate claims take place that year, only $1 million of total insurance is available for all the claims; and
• Choosing to go without insurance coverage at all, in an apparent effort to keep plaintiffs from bringing any claims — and theoretically discouraging attorneys from taking on worthy cases on a contingency-fee basis because the nursing home has no insurance.
Victims of nursing home abuse or neglect can take heart, however. My St. Louis personal injury law firm does not let the fact a nursing facility has little or no insurance prevent us from taking on a case we feel deserves to be pursued. There are certain steps that can be taken to pursue alternate methods of recovering awarded damages.
These other routes of nursing home abuse or neglect recovery include:
• Gaining rights to the nursing facility’s assets after being awarded a judgment against a nursing home with little or no insurance coverage;
• Investigating a nursing home’s trail of money to find out where the monetary assets end up if a facility continues claiming it is either losing money or has a very small amount; since if the nursing home keeps operating rather than folding, the money is obviously going somewhere;
• This will likely involve hiring an accounting expert to help determine any methods of “creative accounting” in which a nursing facility may be engaging; judges will often allow plaintiffs to delve into the assets of a facility and its owners via extensive discovery to find out just where that money trail leads; and
• Investigating whether the nursing facility may have abused the use of LLCs (limited liability corporations) to try to protect owners and managers who deliberately commit wrongdoing from facing responsibility for their actions.
• A regular pattern of management decisions that are systemic and obviously place patients at risk could open the door for corporate actors to be held personally liable, no matter the existence of LLCs in an attempt to shield wrongdoers.
Nursing homes which carry little or no insurance but continue running their facilities are obviously finding money to run from somewhere, so our St. Louis personal injury law firm will not necessarily be deterred from representing a nursing home abuse or neglect case we believe has merit. Please consider contacting us to learn about our experience in representing these types of cases on a contingency-fee basis. An initial consultation will cost you nothing, and could help you or any loved one who has been the victim of nursing home abuse or neglect seek the restitution you so justly deserve.
Disclaimer: The choice of a lawyer is an important decision and should not be based solely upon advertisements.
Source: “News & Trends: Lack of insurance hinders recovery in nursing home cases,” by Sara Hoffman Jurand, Associate Editor. February 2006, Volume 42, No. 2.