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Bruce Rauner – Nursing Home Scandal Stretched To Chicago Suburbs

The corporation founded by Bruce Rauner’s private equity firm to buy up and profit from nursing homes nationwide ran three such homes in the Chicago area—two in south suburban Burbank and one in Barrington, state and company records show.

The Chicago-area homes—Exceptional Health Care and Brentwood Sub-Acute in Burbank and Governor’s Park in Barrington—were repeatedly cited by authorities for violations including:

Exceptional Health Care was threatened with the loss of its federal Medicaid certification and fined by the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid in the wake of the sexual assault case. This was an “Immediate Jeopardy” finding, “a crisis situation in which the health and safety of individual(s) are at risk”.

GTCR’s Trans Healthcare operated the Chicago-area homes around the same time residents were being abused, neglected, and even dying at the company’s homes in Florida, where courts have awarded more than $1 billion in wrongful death suits brought by survivors of THI victims. (background)

Various THI companies were registered in Illinois beginning in June and July 2003, according to the Illinois Secretary of State. THI made campaign contributions in at least 2002 and 2003 to an Illinois nursing home industry PAC.

GTCR’s THI appears to have run the Burbank homes—Exceptional and Brentwood—for at least three years or more. The facilities were listed on THI’s website between 2003 and 2006. The Barrington facility was sold to another nursing home company, Alden.

GTCR created THI in 1998, one of what the Wall Street Journal called “vulture investors attempting to scavenge health care assets” by “circling the carnage in the nursing home industry”. In 2006 GTCR sold the company’s “unencumbered assets” (nursing homes) in one transaction to New York investors and its liabilities (e.g., judgments in the wrongful death suits) in a separate transaction to an unwitting elderly graphic artist.

Rauner sat on the THI board of directors until at least 2002. Two other GTCR executives—Ned Jannotta, one of Rauner’s top campaign contributors, and Bill Goldberg—also served on the board, as did Tom Erickson, hand-picked from another GTCR portfolio company, LifeCare.

Rauner’s nursing home holdings have drawn stark criticism from senior advocates in Illinois:

 

News Story Source: (LINK)