Nursing Home Mandatory Arbitration Clauses
The Legal Medicine Blog (Dan Frith and Lauren Ellerman of the Frith Law Firm in Roanoke, VA) have a good blog post today on a pressing issue for nursing home lawyers and their clients: whether mandatory arbitration clauses should be enforced in nursing home cases.
In recent years, nursing homes not only in Maryland and Virginia but around the country have been requiring patients to sign mandatory arbitration clauses before admitting patients. Of course, this stacks the deck against the patient because, among other reasons, it limits discovery into just how awful the nursing home is to its patients generally and the plaintiff in particular.
Many people never see this clause because they rarely read the small print. If they do, think think of the Hobson's choice given to these patients and their families. They can either hope for the best (don’t we always do that walking through the door?) and just waive the right to receive a fair shot at receiving compensation for the negligence of the nursing home or they can go look for a nursing home that does not have an arbitration clause. But, realistically, the decision to choose the nursing home is already made before they get to the arbitration clause.
Hopefully, help is on the way. Congress is looking at this issue. Rep. Linda Sánchez from California has offered a bill that would void any mandatory arbitration agreement executed by a nursing home resident. Not so coincidentally, Rep. Sánchez father recently went to a nursing home.
