A close family friend of and donor to Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill (Mo.) is a nursing home executive with a troubling record of health and safety problems in his industry.
Rick DeStefane is the owner and president of Reliant Care Group and has been accused of running nursing homes with numerous health and safety lapses that have led to resident deaths, the Kansas City Star reports.
At nursing homes owned by DeStefane, multiple residents have fallen from windows to their deaths, sometimes because employees failed to follow policy and do regular nightly checks.
"You don't routinely see people falling out of windows. It's more of a lightning strike kind of thing," said Eric Carlson, directing attorney with Justice In Aging, a California-based advocacy group. "The first one should have been enough for them to figure out they had some vulnerability and fix it so it doesn't happen again."
The Kansas City Star detailed a series of issues plaguing DeStefane's nursing homes, including mismanagement by staff.
Inspection reports and court filings describe urine- and feces-soaked beds and furniture, staff who failed to protect residents from abuse or didn't properly report a resident's allegation of sexual assault by a medical technician, and patients who allegedly suffered such severe pressure ulcers that they died or had to endure the amputation of a limb. One nursing home didn't have a working sprinkler system. Another was cited for not properly monitoring a suicidal patient whom staff later found hanged in a bedroom.
DeStefane is a close family friend of McCaskill and her husband, Joseph Shepard. DeStefane and Shepard own a vacation property together on the Lake of the Ozarks. McCaskill tweeted a photo last year of herself having a watermelon mojito while lounging there.
DeStefane has also been a regular donor to McCaskill's campaigns. He has given $14,600 to McCaskill's campaign committee, the maximum amount allowed, since she first ran for the Senate in 2005.
The nursing home executive's latest donation to McCaskill's campaign was on June 26 for the maximum amount allowed this cycle, $5,400. Two days later, Reliant Care Group settled with the federal government over allegations that DeStefane and his company committed Medicare fraud by knowingly submitting false claims for unnecessary therapy to nursing home residents between Jan. 1, 2008 and June 30, 2014, the Star reported.
Reliant management reportedly pressured therapists to provide services they did not believe were medically necessary and sought inflated reimbursement from Medicare "influenced by its own financial considerations," according to settlement documents released by the Justice Department.
DeStefane and Reliant agreed to repay the federal government $8.3 million "to avoid the delay, uncertainty, inconvenience, and expense of protracted litigation," the settlement reads. He denied any wrongdoing.
McCaskill has positioned herself in the Senate as an advocate for greater protections for senior citizens, vowing to clean up the nursing home industry.