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Pa. Supreme Court ruling gives PennLive win in fight for records tied to troubled Golden Living nursing home chain

Patriot-News - 9/16/2021

The state Supreme Court on Thursday ended a three-year legal battle over public records access between PennLive and the new owners of the former Golden Living nursing homes in Pennsylvania.

The high court did that by refusing to hear an appeal by the new owners, who sought to prevent the news media outlet from obtaining state records regarding the transfer of the 35 nursing homes from the troubled Golden Living chain.

Former PennLive reporter Daniel Simmons-Ritchie sought that data from the state Department of Health in 2018 while he and fellow reporter David Wenner were working on the “Failing the Frail” and “Still Failing the Frail” series, an investigation into the sub-par performance of nursing facilities in Pennsylvania.

Simmons-Ritchie sought copies of all correspondence between the Health Department and the facility owners regarding to the changes of ownership starting from Jan. 1, 2016. He requested all agreements and contracts, including leases, regarding the ownership changes for the same time frame, along with correspondence to and from several department officials, including former Secretary of Health Dr. Rachel Levine.

The state Office of Open Records ordered the health department to provide Simmons-Ritchie with those records, but the new owners first tried to block his access by appealing to Commonwealth Court. The new owners argued that most of the information Simmons-Ritchie sought involved confidential propriety information and trade secrets which are not subject to public release under the state’s Right to Know Law.

They appealed to the Supreme Court after the lower court, in an opinion issued by Judge Renee Cohn Jubelirer in January 2020, ordered the health department to provide the records to Simmons-Ritchie. The Supreme Court’s denial of that appeal will end the records access battle.

PennLive wasn’t the only entity investigating Golden Living. In 2015, the state attorney general’s office sued the chain over conditions at 25 of its 35 homes in Pennsylvania. State investigators accused the Texas-based chain of chronic understaffing, poor care, and falsifying records to deceive state inspectors.

Last week, Attorney General Josh Shapiro announced his office had reached a consent agreement that requires Golden Living’s parent organization to pay $6 million to settle a six-year court battle over claims the chain employed deceptive advertising in which deliberately overstated the level of care it provided.

©2021 Advance Local Media LLC. Visit pennlive.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

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