Posted on June 4th, 2019
Below is a complete transcript of this video.
What’s up fellow entrepreneurs? It’s John Fagerholm from Metal Law Group, and for this video, I want to get really specific about an industry instead of specific about a law, or a type of law, or anything related to something that affects everybody.
Today I wanted to get specific with the home healthcare industry. I decided to do a video on home healthcare because with the aging population, especially Baby Boomers, it’s big business right now.
From what I’ve read in certain reports it’s not even going to it its peak till 2035 I think is what I read.
So, that means that there are going to be a lot of people retiring here, a lot of people that are going to be in need of some sort of home healthcare.
I’ve seen a large uptick in lawsuits against home healthcare, so I wanted to talk about the lawsuits that I see so that if you have a home healthcare business you can look out for it.
So, wage and hour are the big ones for home healthcare. The most at risk is when you have live-in. That’s for both communities, you know, people that own a facility and then they also have the caregivers that live there, and then also it’s for even the single person who lives at home and the family hires somebody to come work and live. So, the biggest risk the … It’s not the only risk, but the biggest risk is the live-in.
The suits that I see with the live-ins is a bunch of overtime. Since they live there they claim they are on-call on duty. So, there’s lawsuits where since they’re only paid for the hours that are worked then there’s no way to prove that they didn’t actually work or that they weren’t on call, and so then there’s this huge lawsuit.
For bigger facilities, the very large ones, I’ve seen class action type of lawsuits, and I think more people are going to be building the bigger facilities.
The other thing to look out for, even if you don’t have a big facility, is enterprise liability because in California if … Well, let me start with home health businesses. Sometimes there are multiple ones, and it’s the same owner, and a lot of times they have the same employees that may move around to different homes. What that creates is a thing called enterprise liability.
So, even though you have, let’s say, three different homes and they’re all separate LLCs, same owners, the same company pays everybody, employees are shared, that will create enterprise liability. So, if there’s a lawsuit against one all of the assets of all three are in jeopardy.
So, wage and hour are the big thing or the lawsuits that I see with home healthcare. You have to really make sure that you track all the hours that are worked, track all the overtime that’s worked, track the lunch breaks in and out, remember 30 minutes is what’s required in California unpaid, and they have to be free from duty.
It just can’t be that they’re not doing something specifically for those three … They have to be free to leave and do whatever they want. California doesn’t require you to track the 10 minutes, but as long as you’re tracking everything else you might as well because if there’s nothing else to sue for somebody will try to sue you for that.
Then the live-ins, I don’t operate a business like that, so I don’t know. The stories I hear when I’m interviewing clients, it usually turns out that it’s for the benefit of the employee that they let them live there, but at the end of the day it’s too much risk and I just don’t think it’s doable.
If you have to absolutely do it then figure out a way to make sure that it’s understood that they’re off duty whether you sign waivers for that, whether you write that somewhere.
I don’t know, but anyway, so for home healthcare businesses, those are the big risks.
Until next time fellow entrepreneurs.
See you later.
