Let’s call it what it is: a corporatized abuse syndicate wearing the mask of elder care, enabled by a government that’s either asleep at the wheel—or bought off to look the other way.
Innovative Healthcare Management LLC, the Richmond-based operator of both Colonial Heights and Harrisonburg Health & Rehabilitation Centers, isn’t some rogue outlier. They’re a symptom of a much larger disease—one where profits come before people, and where justice dies in committee rooms padded with campaign checks.
Colonial Heights made $8 million in profits between 2020 and 2023. Then, poof—an $89,000 “loss” in the year state investigators came knocking. How? Related-party transactions—shell games where facilities pay “vendors” that just happen to be owned by the same people who own the facility itself. It’s how you make it look like there’s no money left for patient care while siphoning millions out the back door.
And while Dale Painter was being left in a urine-soaked brief on dried pads, suffering from sepsis and MRSA due to ignored catheter care at Harrisonburg Health & Rehab, Adult Protective Services confirmed a preponderance of evidence of abuse and neglect—then closed the case. Why? Because Dale was no longer a resident.
No longer at risk, they said.
No longer relevant, is what they meant.
But what about the other residents? What about accountability? What about justice?
And here’s where things go from tragic to infuriating:
These facilities stay open. The money keeps flowing. And the lawmakers who are supposed to stop it are pocketing checks from the very industry they’re pretending to regulate.
Just look at the Virginia House Health and Human Services Committee—the very body responsible for oversight of long-term care:
• Over $517,000 in donations from healthcare lobbyists and PACs
• $300,900 more from American Healthcare LLC to delegates outside the committee who still vote on healthcare laws
That’s more than $800,000 influencing the people writing the rules.
This isn’t policy. This is a racket.
And the donations aren’t coming from your neighborhood clinic or CNA union—they’re from:
• HCA Healthcare, fined $2 billion for Medicare/Medicaid fraud (yes, billion)
• Acadia Healthcare, accused of detaining patients for profit and operating dangerously understaffed psychiatric facilities
• Molina Healthcare, fined $40 million this year alone for denying medically necessary services and concealing violations
• Health Connect America, an HCA affiliate, fined $4.6 million for Medicaid fraud in Virginia
• American Healthcare LLC, operator of multiple poorly rated nursing homes and donor of $300,900 to lawmakers not even on the health oversight committee—quietly buying influence in the halls of the General Assembly
These are the same types of corporations filling facilities like Harrisonburg and Colonial Heights. They don’t provide care—they extract value. From staff. From residents. From Medicaid. From you.
And our elected officials?
They cash the checks. Then they kill the bills.
Why is this issue so “complicated”? Because they made it that way. It doesn’t need to be.
It’s not complicated to say:
• Staffing levels must be safe—because understaffing isn’t just a burden, it’s abuse
• Facilities must be accountable—when residents are harmed, there must be consequences
• Admissions pipelines must be reformed—stop flooding facilities with patients they cannot safely serve, just to fill beds and boost Medicaid billing
• Profiting off suffering should not be a business model—and yet, in Virginia, it is
But these reforms threaten the golden goose.
And so we get task forces. We get lip service. We get silence.
Let’s be real: If lawmakers were half as committed to protecting residents as they are to protecting corporate donations, Dale wouldn’t have suffered. Neither would the woman who died in Colonial Heights. Neither would thousands of others.
This is not just bad policy. This is deliberate negligence, dressed up in bureaucracy.
And maybe it’s time to stop asking our current leaders to do the right thing—because they’ve shown us who they are.
Maybe it’s time to start looking for new leaders. Ones who don’t think protecting life and dignity is optional.
Because when the people who are supposed to guard the vulnerable are as useful as tits on a boar hog, it’s time to clear the pen.
Remember that when they seek reelection.