Nursing homes buy pretend insurance- they don’t protect you. July 29, 2009

Our nursing home abuse clients are always surprised when we tell them about the kind of insurance nursing homes usually have.  We tell them nursing homes basically do not have insurance.  Our clients then respond by asking, “Doesn’t the Florida Legislature require insurance?”  The answer to that question is that the Legislature has failed to protect the Florida public.

The Legislature does in fact require that nursing homes have an insurance policy to protect victims of the nursing home’s negligence.  However, and this is a big “however,” the Legislature does not require any specific amount of insurance. So the nursing homes buy pretend insurance.

One form of pretend insurance is known as a “wasting policy.”  With this type of “insurance” the nursing home buys a low policy limit such as $25,000 or $50,000.  The trick though is that the amount of the $25,000-$50,000 left to pay the victims of the home’s negligence is reduced by the cost of defending the lawsuit.

The costs include attorneys’ fees and expert witness fees along with a variety of other expenses.  Litigating nursing home lawsuits is expensive.  Attorneys spend a great deal of time working on the case and expert witnesses charge very large fees, sometimes $1,000 an hour.  Thus by the time a case has proceeded through trial, there is most often no money left from the insurance company to pay the nursing home resident who was injured.

Therefore, when you are choosing a nursing home ask the administrator to show you a copy of their professional liability insurance policy.  If the nursing home has only pretend insurance it is a sign that it does not want to protect its residents and does not want to be accountable for its negligence.

For much more information about nursing homes and protecting your family members, see our nursing home practice section on our website zqlawyers.com.