A Breach of Trust: WWII Veteran Wrongfully Denied Coverage

A WWII Veteran known for his integrity and love of family, he worked hard his entire life to give them the best upbringing and memories he possibly  could.  He taught his young ones to always be honest and to keep their word without hesitation.  To him, that was ultimately important and his example served well.

Little did he know, as he raised his children in honor and honesty, that  one day he would be the victim of a breach of trust by one, who should  have been his champion, during a devastating medical crisis.  He trusted  and he was betrayed.  Never again shall his life be as once promised.

 Deceit won the battle that day, but the truth was not conquered. 

Truth fights on and strives to win the war against those who deny care for  profit and because they can.

Truth and knowledge will bring the deceit and trickery into the light  and hopefully prevent others from being denied proper care at critical  moments.  People deserve better than that.  People should be able to  trust the caregivers and providers.  People deserve the chance to  recover and live on in dignity and with purpose to whatever degree is theirs to behold.  People should and it is time eyes are opened and the truth be seen by a population unaware.  It’s time people rather than  profits trump and honesty prevail.

A Breach of Trust is never acceptable and it shan’t be silently tolerated! 

Be intolerant — add your voice in objection to deceit and trickery that wrongfully denies coverage!

Source:
A Breach of Trust:  Wrongfully Denied Coverage

Dysfunction at the California Fiduciaries Bureau

The California Department of Consumer Affairs Professional Fiduciaries Bureau (“DCAPFB”) has recently released, through its advisory committee, a 2013 Strategic Planning Session with attachments, which indicates great dysfunction within the DCAPFB, and which also includes a 2013 DCAPFB Environmental Scan Analysis.

The analysis includes interviews conducted with Advisory Committee Members of the DCAFFB, three separate online surveys for internal Department of Consumer Affairs (“DCA”) stakeholders, external stakeholders, and advocates of consumers, though Fiduciary Watch, Inc., was not asked to participate.  And, three separate online surveys for internal DCA stakeholders, external stakeholders and advocates of consumers, which the DCAPFB claims it planned to use as a discussion guide for the August 1, 2013, Fiduciary Bureau planning sessions of August 1, 2013, and August 2, 2013, which conveniently, the DCAPFB did not video tape, thereby preventing those who did not attend, including the California Pubic, and vulnerable California consumers, from knowing that licensing, not consumer protection, is first and foremost, at the DCAPFB.

Full Article and Source:
Dysfunction at the California Fiduciaries Bureau

Read the report:  Professional Fiduciaries Bureau Strategic Planning Session

Recommended Website: A Breach of Trust: WWII Veteran and Wife

Humana Inc., one of the nation’s largest managed-care companies, was accused in a Federal lawsuit yesterday of misleading health plan members by failing to disclose financial incentives to doctors and case reviewers intended to keep down costs by limiting or denying care.

The suit, filed on behalf of workers in Florida and Texas, asked a United States District Court in Miami to certify a class action on behalf of more than six million customers of Humana health plans nationwide. The suit seeks triple damages under the Federal anti-racketeering law. No amounts were specified.

The plaintiffs say they did not get the health coverage that they thought they were selecting because the company did not disclose incentives to doctors to deny care.

Joseph Sellers, a Washington lawyer who represents the plaintiffs in Miami, said the suit did not question whether managed care was a good idea or whether cost should be a factor. Instead, the suit contends that there was a ”breach of trust” because plan members thought that medical guidelines would solely determine their treatment.

Source:
Humana Sued in Federal Court Over Incentives for Doctors

The History of Nursing Homes

In the twenty-first century, nursing homes have become a standard form of care for the most aged and incapacitated persons. Nearly 6 percent of older adults are sheltered in residential facilities that provide a wide range of care. Yet such institutions have not always existed; rather, their history and development reflect relatively recent demographic and political realities that shape the experience of growing old. Before the nineteenth century, no age-restricted institutions existed for long-term care. Rather, elderly individuals who needed shelter because of incapacity, impoverishment, or family isolation often ended their days in an almshouse. Placed alongside the insane, the inebriated, or the homeless, they were simply categorized as part of the community’s most needy recipients.

In the beginning of the nineteenth century, women’s and church groups began to establish special homes for the elderly persons. Often concerned that worthy individuals of their own ethnic or religious background might end their days alongside the most despised society, they established—as the founder of Boston’s Home for Aged Women (1850), explained—a haven for those who were “bone of our bone, and flesh of our flesh”. Advocates for these asylums contrasted their benevolent care with the horrors of those who were relegated to the almshouse. “We were grateful,” wrote the organizers of Philadelphia’s Indigent Widows’ and Single Women’s Society, one of the nation’s earliest old age homes, in 1823, “that through the indulgence of Divine Providence, our efforts have, in some degree, been successful, and have preserved many who once lived respectfully from becoming residents of the Alms House”.

Although designed for those without substantial familial support, these early homes still generally required substantial entrance fees and certificates of good character. Through these policies, the founders strove to separate their own needy poor from, as the Boston founder explained, foreigners who “have taken possession of the public charities. . .as they have of the houses where our less privileged classes formerly resided”.

Not surprisingly, perhaps, throughout the nineteenth century the numbers of elderly people who found shelter in these institutions was rather limited. In 1910 the state of Massachusetts, reported that 2,598 persons resided in such asylums. The great majority of these individuals were widowed and single women who had lived their entire lives, or at least a great proportion, as citizens of the state. Although the institutions were hardly palatial, the amount spent on each resident was far greater than the allocation for each almshouse resident. Much as their founders had hoped, the nineteenth-century old-age home operated to differentiate the “worthy” old of a particular religion or ethnic group from the most needy and desperate of the aged population.

Full Article and Source:
FATE: The History of Nursing Homes

60 Plus Association

Founded in 1992, the 60 Plus Association is a non-partisan seniors advocacy group with a free enterprise, less government, less taxes approach to seniors issues.

60 Plus has set ending the federal estate tax and saving Social Security for the young as its top priorities.

 60 Plus is often viewed as the conservative alternative to the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP).

Source:
60 Plus Association

What is the Elder Justice Coordinating Council?

The Elder Justice Act of 2009, as part of the Affordable Care Act, establishes the Elder Justice Coordinating Council to coordinate activities related to elder abuse, neglect, and exploitation across the Federal government. The Elder Justice Coordinating Council is directed by the Office of the Secretary of Health and Human Services and the Secretary serves as the Chair of the Council. Secretary Sebelius assigned responsibility for implementing the Coordinating Council to the Administration on Community Living/Administration on Aging. The Administration on Aging has long been engaged in efforts to protect older individuals from elder abuse including financial exploitation, physical abuse, neglect, psychological abuse, and sexual abuse. Through the Older Americans Act, the Administration on Aging endeavors to preserve the rights of older people and protect those who may not be able to protect themselves.

The Elder Justice Act also names the Attorney General of the United States as a permanent member of the Council. In addition to the Secretary of Health and Human Services and the Attorney General, the statute provides for inclusion as Council members the heads of each Federal department, agency or governmental entity identified as administering programs related to abuse, neglect, or financial exploitation.

Source:
Elder Justice Coordinating Council

See Also:
Member List

NCPJ – National College of Probate Judges

The National College of Probate Judges (“NCPJ”), organized in 1968, is the only national organization exclusively dedicated to improving probate law and probate courts. “Probate jurisdiction” varies from state to state. However, generally, all probate courts handle cases involving the estates of deceased persons, adult guardianship and protective proceedings, and mental health and addictive disease treatment, and matters concerning developmentally disabled persons. In some states, probate courts handle adoptions, certain juvenile matters, and/or guardianship and conservatorship of minors.

Probate jurisdiction is exercised exlusively or partly in separate probate courts in seventeen (17) states. In the remaining thirty-three (33) states and the District of Columbia, probate jurisdiction is exercised in the general jurisdiction trial courts by assignment or rotation among the judges in multi-judge districts or circuits.

Source:
NCPJ.org

See Also:
2013 National Probate Court Standards

Recommended Website: CANHR

Since 1983, California Advocates for Nursing Home Reform (CANHR), a statewide nonprofit 501(c)(3) advocacy organization, has been dedicated to improving the choices, care and quality of life for California’s long term care consumers.

Through direct advocacy, community education, legislation and litigation it has been CANHR’s goal to educate and support long term care consumers and advocates regarding the rights and remedies under the law, and to create a united voice for long term care reform and humane alternatives to institutionalization.

Source:
CANHR.org

Recommended Website: Financial Abuse of the Elderly – Understand it to Deal with it Effectively

In a sentence, Florida’s exploitation law (FSS 825.103) states that when someone maliciously takes the property of an “elderly person,” they are committing exploitation. That’s the essence of the law.

But there is also an important requirement: Within this law, an “elderly person” is defined as someone 60 years of age or older who is suffering from the infirmities of aging to the extent that their ability to adequately care for and protect themselves is impaired. The law states that the elderly person must suffer a physical or mental infirmity. Therefore, exploitation is based primarily on infirmities or disabilities and not deception.

This is why exploitation is not fraud and why it can be much more devastating and offensive. Fraud is generally defined as deception that is carried out for the purpose of achieving personal gain while causing injury to another party. Exploitation requires more than that. It requires that the victims suffer disabilities that make them more vulnerable. And when the victim is more vulnerable, the victim impact is far worse.

To compare exploitation to fraud would be like comparing robbery to larceny. If you told a police officer that robbery is the worst type of larceny, he or she would correct you and say that they are two different crimes. Larceny simply means the taking of another’s property, while robbery requires the taking by force or threat. In the same sense, exploitation and fraud are also two different crimes. While scammers focus on things that their victims want with deception, exploiters focus on things victims need through the dependency caused by their infirmities.

So if you’re going to walk away with one thought from my book, make it this,

“Scammers prey on greed while exploiters prey on need.”

Source:
FinancialAbuseOfTheElderly

See Also:

Financial Abuse of the Elderly – A Detective’s Case Files of Exploitation Crimes

>Abuse and Corruption Rampant in Probate Court of Cook County, IL

>The end of life has many challenges for the elderly. It can be a fast or a long goodbye and might involve a transition to assisted living, a nursing home, or a live-in caretaker.

Now is the time to guard against opportunists, who like vultures are circling to claim flesh, whether the person is alive or dead, even if a large sum of money isn’t involved. For elder abuse bi-passes color, race or creed and extends also to disabled children.

Although the presence of wealth often brings out the worst in human kind, preying on the elderly can amount to nothing more than gaining access to the individual’s monthly Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security or Veterans Disability payments.

More far reaching abuse happens in situations where the appointed guardian is removed from his/her position by a court order and replaced by a court-appointed guardian (Guardian ad Litem). It now becomes the responsibility of the the court-appointed guardian to make judgments about medical care, property, living arrangements, lifestyle and potentially all personal and financial decisions.

But it doesn’t end here, the court appointed guardian, in collaboration with the lawyer, presiding judge and the nursing home, use the very judicial system they are part of to profit financially by functioning as partners in the management and control of all aspects of a vulnerable person’s life.

Cook County Probate Court Corruption Addressed
What I have described is common practice on the 18th Floor of Daley Center, home to Probate Court in Cook County. Thievery is taking place and savings are being milked in a massive transfer of wealth that is disappearing into the pockets of judges and lawyers instead of the legitimate heirs.

So wide spread is the corruption in the Chicago Probate Court System, that Bev and Ken Cooper created up a website to expose and remedy corruption in the Probate Court of Cook County. http://www.ProbateSharks.com

Their Illinois website assists, educates and enlightens families of the dead, the dying, the disabled and the aged to better understand their rights in order to protect themselves from the excesses of the Cook County Probate Court. As the site depends on networking, it invites you or someone you know to send stories that tell of probate abuse. Names are kept confidential if there is fear of retaliation against a loved one. The site postings reveal up-to-date incidences of abuse in Cook County Probate Court.

Ken and Bev Cooper first became aware of abuse in the Chicago Probate Court system after a highly emotional and devastating experience with Beverly Cooper’s mother.

About Beverly Cooper, she is producer and host of North Shore “Live” Cooper’s Corner, a weekly cable Comcast TV program that is broadcast live every Wednesday night from a studio in Highland Park and then shown throughout Lake County. This is Bev Cooper’s 30th year as producer of the show. Bev.cooperscorner@yahoo.com

Bev has quite a story to tell about the elder abuse of her own mother, Alice Gore, which has expanded to include 10 videotaped testimonies from individuals appearing on Bev’s North shore “Live” Cooper’s Corner program, all of whom experienced similar gross injustices as did Bev Cooper in dealing with her mother in Probate Court on the 18th Floor of the Daley Building.

Full Article and Source:
Abuse and Corruption Rampant in Probate Court of Cook County, IL

See Also:
ProbateSharks

Note: We will run more excerpts from this artilce soon! To be continued…