09/23/2018
No word yet from Governor Kasich on this:
Governor John Kasich 15 August 2018
Riffe Center, 30th Floor
77 South High Street
Columbus, OH 43215-6117
(614) 466-3555
Governor Kasich, good morning,
Something is quite seriously amiss in our Attorney General’s Health Care Fraud Unit: They are concealing the rather brutal nursing home abuse that preceded my mother’s death, (files 2 and 4, attached, and otherwise available upon request.) They are complicit in the perjury that her guardian, an attorney, committed trying to conceal his crimes from the OAG's investigators.
Context: Criminal misconduct by guardianship attorneys is so pervasive that the probate court in Franklin County has swept its house clean of them. (Columbus Dispatch, 19 July 2016: “Social workers replacing lawyers as guardians in Franklin County.")
The Health Care Fraud Unit is at odds with that welcome reform: they are rubber-stamping their investigation of a decade ago, (OAG Case # M2080079) - a sham, done under the watch of AG Marc Dann, (ousted for his own rotten behavior towards women.) And this case is still timely, not only because Cuyahoga County’s probate court continues to turn some of its wards over to the same guardian - regardless the plenitude of proof, long since provided to the court, that his conduct is aligned solely with the pecuniary interests of the nursing home industry; is unlawful; and is highly injurious to his wards and their families.
I faxed prima facie documentation of his perjury to fraud unit chief John Guthrie in 2009 - and he replied by threatening to prosecute me … “for harassment” ... if I contacted his office again.
File 1, attached, is the police report documenting that threat, and yes, that report is so pallid -- for the riptide of nursing home corruption runs deep and wide.
One measure of it is a 2002 Cincinnati Enquirer article reporting that every five days a ward of our state dies in a nursing home - because of abuse or neglect.[2]
Another: when Governor Taft empaneled a task force to address that, the commissioners found, among other systemic ills, a ‘pattern of state regulators failing to follow through on nursing homes with persistent problems.'[3]
The panel’s good recommendations, (file 5, attached,) were shut down by the nursing home lobbyists, as was expected, and that is all too evident in File 2 here, a 2017 letter from the current fraud unit chief. Her bias is illuminated in the grave disparity between Files 3 and 4.
Corruption is not inevitable, says Harvard Kennedy School’s Robert I. Rotberg, though each advance in the battle to curb it is hard-won. "Political will, usually in the form of committed national leadership, plays a major role."[4]
Such leadership - from county to federal - has yet to be seen. (MacArthur fellow and former DOJ attorney M. T. Connolly agrees.) But as baby boomers age they will be looking for leaders who will put their talents to forging serious reform of the nursing home industry and the agencies mandated to regulate it.
I turn to you, Governor, having been denied remedy in every corner. But in that search I have found that the doors to peaceful dispute resolution are too often shut fast to the average citizen, and that may explain why one awful, sinister alternative - school shootings - is on the rise.
Please lets show today’s youth a better way.
For them, for my mother, for the unfortunate ones now in her shoes, I ask you to finally bring this cause to justice.
Please appoint a special investigator, independent of both the Fraud Unit and the LTCO, to examine the complete file, which includes the report published at blackhawkgroup-midwest.blogspot.com.
I think you will find that this cause, being long mishandled, deserves your close supervision.
Yours,
Hayes Rowan
The Susanna Project
2026 W 52
Cleveland OH 44102
216 903 5201
hayesrowan@gmail.com
bookofsusanna.blogspot.com
[1] Carson v. Elrod, United States Court of Appeals, Fourth Circuit.
[2] Cincinnati Enquirer, 27 March 02. (And the problem is worse than that, for their cohort included only developmentally-disabled men and women.)
[3] Plain Dealer, 5 Feb 02, B-5.
[4] Robert I. Rotberg, The Corruption Cure: How Citizens and Leaders Can Combat Graft. Princeton University Press, 2017. Professor Rotberg is the founding director of the Program on Intrastate Conflict, Conflict Prevention, and Conflict Resolution at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government. He has served as the president of the World Peace Foundation.
Attachments:
1 - Cleveland Police Dept., Incident Report No., 09-67688
2 – Letter of K. R. Mitchell, OAG Health Care Fraud Unit, 3 Jan 2017
3 – guardian’s email threatening 'the family law equivalent of the death penalty,' days before my mother died in severe pain.
4 – Exhibit A – The Timeline
5 - NEWSBANK - DISABILITY - ABUSE - LE edu
“No bond is more precious than that between parent and child,and none should be more zealously protected by the law.”
- Carson v. Elrod
