First of all, I’d like to thank the many readers and contributors to The Progressive who have expressed good wishes to my family and me regarding my mother, Elaine Benz, who, as I wrote in our February/March issue (“I Want to Go Home” ), was evicted from her senior care residence in late October with no advance notice.
I also want to acknowledge the many people who have shared their stories, affirming that these evictions, which often violate state and federal law, happen all the time. “Sorry about what happened to your mom,” one person wrote. “It happened to my mom too!” The details they shared are very similar.
Elaine Benz with daughter Diane at her ninety-eighth birthday celebration in February 2022.
Elaine is doing fine, about the same as she was before her senior care facility, the Regency of New Berlin, Wisconsin, kicked her out—just as her ability to pay in full was nearing an end. Our family gathered at her new home in mid-February to celebrate her ninety-eighth birthday. She enjoyed our visit, and we all had cake.
My sister, Diane, meanwhile, was ejected from the Regency on February 3, when she stopped by to give away the carrying bags she makes for residents’ walkers, as she had done for the years our mom lived there. The campus administrator, Mara Henningsen, demanded that she leave the premises. This was a few days after Diane had dropped by and handed out copies of the magazine containing my article.
In late January, Henningsen sent a letter to residents. It read in part: “We have a compassionate and professional team. We understand that some of our residents will reach a point where they require care beyond what we can offer. This is what happened in a situation described in a recent article in The Progressive Magazine. This was a difficult time for the family involved, and we supported them as best we could.”
Similar verbiage was offered up by ProHealth Care Inc., the Regency’s “not-for-profit” owner, which made more than $100 million in “revenue-less expenses” in its latest reported fiscal year. “Regency residents sometimes reach a point where they require care beyond what Regency can offer,” it said in a statement to Wisconsin Public Radio, which hosted me and one of the sources quoted in my story, Nicole Shannon of the Michigan Elder Justice Initiative, for its hour-long morning show. “At all times, families are treated with the dignity and respect they deserve,” it claimed.
But in fact, the state of Wisconsin determined that the Regency was in the wrong, both in its assertions regarding Elaine’s condition and in its failure to properly involve family members in the process—which would have happened if there was indeed any intention to treat us with dignity and respect.
On February 1, the Division of Quality Assurance within the Wisconsin Department of Health Services issued a “Notice and Order” flagging two “violations of state statutes or administrative code.” It was incorrectly addressed to the Regency’s former campus administrator, who left more than nine months ago in May 2021, even though the state’s own website correctly identifies Henningsen as the current administrator.
The Regency has argued that it did not have to give thirty days’ advance notice, as state administrative code requires, because Elaine’s situation represented an emergency in which she posed an immediate threat to herself or others. The state rejected this claim, saying the facility failed to provide “documented evidence of this threat or significant change in condition.” It also found that the Regency neglected to perform a required comprehensive assessment “with the active participation of the tenant and the tenant’s legal representative” before kicking her out.
The Regency was fined $1,500 for these offenses, but offered, as is standard, a 35 percent discount if paid within ten days of receipt. Instead, the Regency has invoked its right to appeal the findings. That process is ongoing. We have been given no indication whether we will be allowed to participate in any way, just as we were never asked for additional information during the time the matter was said to be under investigation.
The Division of Quality Assurance’s enforcement action, now hanging in limbo, came nearly three months after its inspector determined that the Regency had broken the rules, far too late to prevent the eviction from occurring.
Why should it take so long between documenting a violation of rules and taking enforcement action? This is something I have tried to find out.
In the weeks after my mother’s eviction, I made multiple requests for records from the Wisconsin Department of Health Services. Some dealt with my mother’s case directly, and some with the larger issue of the enforcement of rules in “facility-initiated discharges”—something the Office of Inspector General for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services flagged as a national problem in a recent report.
What I found was consistent with what advocates for the elderly told me when I was researching my article: Enforcement actions over discharge violations are rare, and the penalties are paltry, far less than what would be needed to serve as a deterrent.
Records released to me by the state showed there have been only two other enforcement actions taken of discharge-related violations against any of the roughly 350 Wisconsin facilities in the Regency’s licensing category since January 1, 2019.
In 2020, a provider in Onalaska, Wisconsin, was fined $300 for wrongfully preventing a resident from returning from a hospital stay. In 2021, a facility in Beaver Dam, Wisconsin, was fined $700 for illegally barring a resident from returning to an apartment shared with a spouse. Both were also offered the 35 percent discount for prompt payment. In both cases, the people who were illegally evicted did not come back. (See my follow-up story “Breaking the Law, Paying a Pittance,” published on our website February 4, 2022.)
I also received records for all discharge-related enforcement actions during this period for other state licensing categories. There were twenty-one additional cases in which violations were found to have occurred; of these, just nine led to fines for not giving thirty days’ notice, in most cases for $500. (In some cases, additional penalties were imposed for violations of other rules.)
In comparison, the $1,500 fine imposed in the case of my mother’s eviction is unusually severe. But still, it feels inadequate. Consider that the Regency charged my mom the usual $5,685 for the month of November, during which she was barred from her room. We also paid $7,486 for the 19 days she was stranded at a physical rehabilitation center in a COVID-19 lockdown and not allowed to return home.
I also asked the state for records regarding its handling of my request, which consisted mainly of emails sent to and from me. I did learn that Leanne Bergstrom, a constituent relations specialist with the Wisconsin Department of Health Services, notified officials in the Division of Quality Assurance on October 29 that she had spoken to me about our family’s desire that Elaine be allowed to return to the Regency, but there is nothing to suggest anyone in the division did anything to attempt to make this happen.
In an email sent in early January, in response to an inquiry made by an attorney on my behalf, the administrator of the Division of Quality Assurance, Otis Woods, said the case “remains in an enforcement action.” He said it would be impossible to say how long this would take because “enforcement actions [take] on a life of their own. There is often ongoing dialogue between the regulated entity [and] our office if the department’s action[s] are contested, which could further delay a response to the complainant.”
I also asked the state for all records of “any communications between the Division of Quality Assurance and representatives of the Regency or ProHealth Care Inc.” At one point, the state assured me that “we are working on this case and will continue to work with this provider.” Yet the department says it has no records of any communications with the provider, except for the initial investigation and the imposed fine.
My family and I hope that the appeals process will generate more information I might be able to share with you later about the Regency’s actions and its efforts to contest the state’s findings and fines. And we will continue, at all times, to regard the people who evicted our mom with the dignity and respect they deserve.