By Dean Olsen Staff Writer

More than three months after a Springfield nursing home closed with little warning, many families and former patients of Oak Terrace Healthcare Center are waiting for refunds and wondering why they were put through such stress.

Oak Terrace’s two most recent administrators blame Home Life Companies, the Delaware, Ohio-based business whose top officials made all the key decisions involving Oak Terrace, for what they say was the company’s greed, ignorance and lack of vision.

“The residents — they didn’t have any interest in them except as a source of revenue,” former Oak Terrace administrator Tom Mullins told The State Journal-Register.′

Mullins, 71, an Oreana resident and longtime Illinois nursing home administrator, said Oak Terrace never paid him the $6,559 he was owed for his 17 days of work in August and September.

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Anita Willis says the social worker offered her a painful choice: She could either leave the San Jose, Calif., nursing home where she’d spent a month recovering from a stroke — or come up with $336 a day to stay on.

She had until midnight to decide.

Willis’ Medicaid managed-care plan had told the home that it was cutting off payment because she no longer qualified for such a high level of care. If Willis, 58, stayed and paid the daily rate, her Social Security disability money would run out in three days. But if she left, she had nowhere to go. She’d recently become homeless after a breakup and said she couldn’t even afford a room-and-board setting.

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A central Illinois jury has awarded $5.2 million to a nurse who claims she was fired from a nursing home after reporting alleged abuse.

The (Bloomington) Pantagraph reports Katrina Wesemann worked as a licensed practical nurse at a Dwight facility in 2012 when she was fired. She alleges she was let go because she wouldn’t follow a director’s orders to increase dosages of anti-anxiety medication to agitated residents and refused to change or omit records of suspicious injuries.

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Lawsuit: Former Hearthstone Communities worker says she was fired after reporting abuse

Nursing homes or assisted living facilities are often a transitional step for the elderly after they stop living independently at home but before they enter a skilled nursing facility. Although the number of nursing homes is booming, oversight of these facilities is very limited, and the regulations governing them vary state by state. This lack of uniformity is also evidence in how nursing homes are funded: 43 states, including Illinois, allow Medicaid funds to be used to pay for assisted living care, but the specific services that are funded vary across states. Facilities in the remaining states are entirely private pay, which often leads to facility management making decisions about resident acceptance and retention with an eye toward increasing income over improving resident care. Many corporate nursing homes use a system that assigns points to each resident to quantify the amount of care the resident requires based on individual assessments. Facilities can use these individual assessments to estimate how much daily staff time must be devoted to each resident and the aggregate amount of time needed for all residents on any given day. This point system can be used as evidence that a facility management knew their staffing was inadequate to meet the residents’ needs.

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MOUNT MORRIS — Pinecrest Manor recently was named a Best Nursing Home for 2017-18 by the U.S. News & World Report.

To create the list, U.S. News drew on data from Nursing Home Compare, a program run by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, the federal agency that sets and enforces standards for nursing homes.

There were 73 nursing homes in Illinois labeled as “top performing.” U.S. News and World Report evaluated more than 15,000 nursing homes nationwide to create the list, which represents about 15 percent of all nursing homes.

Pinecrest Manor named Best Nursing Home