Stop Medicare Payments For Nursing Homes’ Unapproved Use Of Antipsychotic Drugs, Government Official Urges
Posted in Featured Articles on December 21, 2011U.S. Health and Human Services Inspector General Daniel Levinson has recommended penalties for nursing homes that inappropriately use powerful psychiatric drugs to calm residents who have dementia.
Levinson has called for Medicare to deny payments for antipsychotic medications when nursing homes wrongly use them to drug dementia patients into sedation.
According to a Fox News report, Levinson recently told the Senate Committee on Aging that hundreds of thousands of elderly U.S. nursing home patients with dementia regularly receive drugs designed to control hallucinations, delusions and other abnormal behavior in people suffering from schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.
Despite repeated government warnings that the practice is unapproved, nursing homes still administer antipsychotic drugs to control the aggressive behavior that is sometimes symptomatic of dementia, the report said. Antipsychotics raise blood sugar and cholesterol, often resulting in weight gain and other side effects that are dangerous to the elderly.
Levinson proposed that Medicare force nursing homes to pay for drugs that are prescribed inappropriately, according to the Associated Press.
Kentucky nursing home abuse and neglect lawyer Lee Coleman said administering antipsychotic drugs to dementia patients amounts to elder abuse with potentially deadly consequences. “This is another instance of nursing homes taking the easier way out instead of providing the services to their patients that they are contracted to provide,” Coleman said.
“Family members of nursing home patients should ask about the drugs being administered to their loved ones and educate themselves about what the drugs named are meant to do,” said Kentucky elder abuse and neglect lawyer and Hughes & Coleman partner J. Marshall Hughes.
“Legal guardians of elderly relatives have a right to this information and, unfortunately, must be proactive in looking out for the welfare of nursing home residents instead of relying on the home’s staff to always do what’s appropriate.”
Anyone who suspects they or an elderly loved one is being administered improper medications in a nursing home or other care facility, or who is otherwise suffering from elder abuse, should seek the help of a Kentucky nursing home abuse and neglect attorney, Hughes said.
