The owners and operators of four nursing homes siphoned off more than $83 million in taxpayer funds while neglecting residents, leading to injuries and death, according to the New York State attorney general, Letitia James, who filed a lawsuit against the owners on Wednesday.
“They put profit over people again and again and again while vulnerable New Yorkers were reduced to skeletons,” Ms. James said at a news conference on Wednesday afternoon, adding that the co-owners of the nursing homes, Kenneth Rozenberg and Daryl Hagler, bought more than $130 million in real estate and even purchased an airline while the homes struggled.
The consequences of this abuse of funds were dire, “leading to elderly residents and those with disabilities suffering unconscionable pain, neglect, degradation and even death,” Ms. James had noted in an earlier statement.
The lawsuit, filed in the State Supreme Court in Manhattan, followed an investigation by the Office of the Attorney General’s Medicaid Fraud Control Unit. It names four nursing homes, all run by Centers Health Care: Holliswood Center for Rehabilitation and Healthcare in Queens, Beth Abraham Center for Rehabilitation in the Bronx, Martine Center for Rehabilitation and Nursing in White Plains, and Buffalo Center for Rehabilitation and Nursing in Buffalo .
The schemes, in which the two owners misappropriated Medicaid and Medicare funds, date back to at least 2013, according to the lawsuit, and involved charging the nursing homes inflated rents of up to 233 percent greater than the rent reported to the State Department of Health ; transferring money to nursing homes associated with Health Care Centers in other states through unnecessary and interest-free loans; and paying hefty invoices to companies owned by Mr. Haggler, Mr. Rozenberg and their families. In some cases, according to the lawsuit, it is unclear what services, if any, these invoices were for.
Jeff Jacomowitz, a spokesman for Centers Health Care, denied the allegations in the lawsuit. “Centers Health Care prides itself on its commitment to patient care,” he said in a statement on Wednesday. “Centers denies the New York attorney general’s allegations wholeheartedly and attempts to resolve this matter out of court. We will fight these spurious claims with the facts on our side.”
At the news conference on Wednesday, a number of victims’ family members stood with Ms. James and described what their relatives had endured.
Talia Wong, whose mother, Mildred, was living at Holliswood in January 2020, said she had to call the police after she was unable to see her mother in person or reach her by phone.
“Normally my mom is very jovial,” Ms. Wong said. “She is always on her phone talking to her friends.”
Ms. Wong later learned her mother required surgery for a brain bleed resulting from a traumatic fall, she said. And while her mother is no longer at Holliswood, she still suffers from speech defects and emotional disturbances, Ms. Wong counted.
Other testimonies, detailed in the lawsuit, revealed similarly disturbing incidents.
At the Martine Center in White Plains, the daughter of a resident discovered that staff members had neglected to provide her mother with a colostomy bag for collecting her waste and had instead wrapped her in a towel, which was filled with feces, the woman told investigators.
At the same center, another woman told investigators that her husband’s untreated bedsores had turned into severe ulcers that ate away most of the man’s buttocks. While she began the process of removing her husband from the nursing home, she developed sepsis, was hospitalized and later died.
All four nursing homes received complaints from residents and family members over unsanitary conditions, including vermin and lingering smells of human waste, according to the lawsuit. They also failed to follow protocols throughout the pandemic, such as quarantining sick residents and providing adequate protective equipment for personnel.
During the pandemic, when staffing at the facilities was reduced to “skeleton crews,” according to the lawsuit, administrators requested more workers and salary increases for the overworked caregivers, as well as limits to the number of new residents. Mr. Rozenberg and Mr. Hagler denied these requests, and even forced staff members who exhibited Covid symptoms to come into work, the suit charges.
During the first two months of the pandemic, Holliswood reported that nearly a quarter of its 314 residents died as a result of Covid, according to the lawsuit. And the four homes reported that in 2020, roughly 400 residents died as a result of Covid.
Ms. James is seeking to prohibit the four nursing homes from admitting any new residents until they hire an adequate number of staff members, fill positions that oversee the nursing homes’ finances and quality of care, pay back the entirety of the $83 million and reimburse the attorney general’s office for the cost of the investigation.
At the news conference, Ms. James, whose office has filed four other lawsuits against nursing homes in the past year, encouraged anyone worried about facility conditions or abuse or neglect of residents to report their concerns, noting that her lawsuit was part of a broader effort at nursing home reform.