As many of you would suspect, I am no fan of New York’s Attorney General, Letitia James. She politicizes too many things and definitely has a partisan agenda, and one which I do not favor. But after reading through the 300-page court filing against Centers Health Care and related companies, as well as its owners, well, I found myself agreeing with her.
The cases involve the poor “care” of residents in a few New York nursing homes, as well as the alleged misuse of $83 million of Medicaid and Medicare funds for other purposes, including, allegedly, the purchase of a large stake in the Israeli airline, EL AL. Money is fungible, and one cannot distinguish between cash from private sources, Medicaid and Medicare. But at a time when the industry is demanding more funding and can’t pay wages high enough to attract or keep staff, well, that’s a lot of dough wherever it came from that should have been used for care.
For those interested, we have included a link to the court filing (https://ag.ny.gov/sites/default/files/court-filings/centers-filed-petition.pdf), yes, all 300 pages. The pictures in it are quite graphic, and we have never seen them used in a court filing before. This lack of care just should not happen, and while I understand it was during the early part of the pandemic when staffing was very difficult, especially in New York, management and the owners should have handled it very differently. Instead of giving ownership stakes to family members, maybe they should have put them to work in the facilities to help the staff. Just don’t think that happened.
I have heard that some brokers have been told by their seller clients not to introduce their offerings to Centers Health Care, that they will not deal with them. That is good to hear. But that is not enough. Their state association and the American Health Care Association have to start doing a better job of identifying the bad apples (maybe up to 5%, I am told) who are hurting the reputation of the other 95%. And, states have to start revoking licenses of the really bad apples and track who their owners are and deny future licenses to them, anywhere. Companies like Skyline Healthcare come to mind. An absolute disgrace in so many ways.
If the industry does not do anything, especially as a new federal staffing mandate may be forced on nursing homes, the situation will get worse, and the bad apples may start to rot the entire tree, and the lawsuits and fines will increase. Not what we need right now. As much as some people would like to see the entire sector go away, it’s not going to happen, so we better try to fix it. A good start would be to deal with the bad apples and stop the rot.
