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America Tonight
This is a follow-up to our investigative report on children’s nursing homes in Florida.
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. – Andrew Martinez was 18 and hoping to become a firefighter when his heart suddenly stopped. The cardiac arrest and oxygen deprivation left him with brain damage, and the outgoing high school senior ended up in The Kidz Korner, a nursing home for children in Plantation, Fla.
Andrew’s dad, Marcello Martinez, said he would love to care for his son, now 20, at home, but he was never told he could have in-home care. Other parents of children with special needs in Florida have the same story. A U.S. Justice Department investigation found that the state “has planned, structured and administered a system of care that has led to the unnecessary segregation and isolation of children, often for many years, in nursing facilities.”
Children in nursing homes are big business. Each child cared for in a nursing home costs $550 a day, more than twice what Florida pays for elderly residents and even more than the state pays for around-the-clock nursing care at home, the state conceded in court documents.
“If you follow the money, you’ll see the influence,” said Nancy Argenziano, a Republican who served in both the Florida House and Senate, where she chaired the committee overseeing nursing homes. “It’s incredible.”
The state insists that parents with medically fragile children are given options, including skilled nursing care in their own homes. But parents told America Tonight they never got a choice.
“We were told there was a government cutback on nursing care where we wouldn't get it full time,” said Gheri Shuler, the grandmother of 11-year-old Deontae, who was struck by a car while riding his bike and is now a quadriplegic. “So it wasn't an option.”
At Kidz Korner, Deontae endured bedsores and broken legs, and describes the conditions as “terrible.” It took hiring a lawyer to finally get him out of The Kidz Korner.
This push for institutionalized care can sometimes have tragic results. A judge ordered Florida to give Doris Freyre’s daughter Marie, who suffered hydrocephalus (or “water on the brain”), cerebral palsy and seizures, enough nursing hours for 24/7 care. Instead, the state took Marie, against her mother’s wishes, on a nearly 300-mile trip from Tampa to Miami, without giving her medication. The next morning, Marie’s heart stopped beating.
“There's no other way of saying things,” Freyre said. “They took her out of my arms and they kill her.”
The state’s $3 billion nursing home industry has enlisted a small army of lobbyists to help throw its muscle around in Tallahassee – 21 in all, lobbying 160 legislators. It’s a ratio that even Bob Asztalos, the group’s chief lobbyist, doesn’t deny is impressive.
“We have a good lobby team,” he said. “That’s for sure.”
A good part of their work is getting legislators elected who are friendly toward the nursing home industry.
“We depend on the legislature, particularly for our funding,” Asztalos said. “I think what we want to see in the legislature is legislators who truly do understand our mission and what we try to do. During the election, if we can find legislators who have long-term care experience, we are happy to support legislators with long-term care experience.”
Nancy Argenziano
Former Florida legislator
For legislators at odds with the nursing home industry’s mission, their beliefs – and careers – are challenged. During her time in office, Argenziano fought the industry on issues such as minimum staffing requirements and help for families needing care at home. She said the nursing home industry actively backed her opponents. She called it a war.
“I had a mind of my own and the lobbyist basically stuck a finger in my face – for the nursing homes – and said to me, ‘We own you,’” she said. “And I looked at her and said, ‘You don’t own me, sister.’ And the war began.”
Argenziano advocated for the idea of “aging in place,” – a system that would help elderly residents, and medically fragile children, to stay in their homes for longer.
“We found it was much cheaper for many people to keep their loved one at home,” she said. “We talked a big storm about aging in place and then they let it die. It was just bought right out of consideration.”
She added: “They have gotten away with so much.”
The nursing home association and its affiliated political action committees spent more than $1.8 million between 2007 and 2013, according to the nonpartisan, nonprofit government watchdog group Integrity Florida. Since 2007, the campaign contributions of Kidz Korner – its owners, their management company, nursing homes and other companies they own – totaled more than $364,000.
The numbers don’t sound that big compared to the hundreds of millions of dollars that are tossed around in campaigns and PACs on the federal level. But in Florida, it’s more than enough to buy a good slice of influence.
“When it comes to a member of the Florida House of Representatives and the Florida Senate, and you’re talking about tens of thousands of dollars,” said Dan Krassner, the cofounder and director of Integrity Florida. “That’s enough, if targeted in the right way, can put a candidate over the top to win an election.”
On a visit to The Kidz Korner, America Tonight found children parked in the hallway, not doing anything. Some were desperate for attention. The home’s calendar calls this activity “chillin’.” Families told America Tonight they had seen the same thing: children neglected for hours, left in the hallway and ignored.
We found Andrew Martinez in his wheelchair, parked in the entryway of his room, unable even to see up or down the corridor. He was moaning loudly — a sound his father told us he makes when he is distressed. None of the staff paid any attention.
“That's basically it,” said Martinez, tearing up. “It’s nothing new to me finding my son stuck in between a door. How's that facility helping him? Just stick him between a door? But that's the reality I have to deal with.”
Asztalos, the nursing home industry lobbyist, defended the activity as “downtime.“
“These children, they can’t play with toys,” he said. “In their downtime, what you see is instead of being isolated in their room, they’re out in the hallway where they get some stimulation.”
This “downtime” also avoids having to pay staff for therapy, or even attention.
Martinez was unable to convince Kidz Korner to give his son more than two hours of speech therapy a month. He said the home was “more like a facility of storage, of storing the kids.”
“These facilities are highly regulated,” Asztalos pointed out. “You have multiple agencies and ombudsmen and county and state and federal agencies in there. If you’re not providing quality of care, you’re going to get shut down.”
But the influence of the nursing home lobby extends to the state agencies that write the rules and regulate the industry, Krassner said.
“These children don’t vote,” he said. “They don’t write campaign checks. They don’t come up to lobby politicians in the Capitol.”
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