On Oct. 22, 2017, the National Union of Healthcare Workers sponsored a forum with the leading candidates to become the next governor of California. During the forum in Anaheim, the candidates were asked about Brius and the challenge of disciplining nursing home companies with poor patient care records.

Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom said as governor he would take a proactive posture in making sure troubled operators are disciplined and that the discipline sticks. “If there’s a bad actor, you’ve got to call that out,” he said. “It’s a question of enforcing the laws on the books and making sure the folks appointed to the positions of oversight are doing their jobs.”

All of the candidates expressed openness to new laws tightening control over nursing homes. Former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa said, “I’ll work with the legislature to make sure we have laws with teeth … to make sure they don’t get away with murder.”

State Treasurer John Chiang said he would make sure the state “identifies those bad actors so they can’t create subsequent companies,” a tactic Brius CEO Shlomo Rechnitz has employed in building his nursing home empire. Chiang added that bad actors can’t be allowed to “evade their past misbehavior. They have to fix the problem before going forward.”

And former State Secretary of Public Instruction Delaine Eastin said: “We need to make sure that those agencies that do the oversight over your hospitals and your nursing homes have people on fire to do the right things for all of you but especially for all those patients who are   not getting the kind of care they deserve in California.”