California Armenian Home - Home in Sarasota, FL points to problems with oversight

Sarasota, FL - Harmony Healthcare under investigation 56000 sq ft, oddly looks like the California Armenian Home
which has had their share of audits, some substantiated some not.  Unfortunately the governing arms have little oversight. 

SARASOTA - Two men imprisoned for health care fraud in the late 1970s slipped by a state agency's screening when they opened a Sarasota nursing home.

The Harmony Healthcare and Rehabilitation Center later became one of the nation's prime examples of what can go wrong in senior housing before it was shut down by state regulators for failing basic safety measures and not accounting for the disbursement of narcotics.

The state Agency for Health Care Administration approved a 2004 application from a company owned by brothers-in-law Benjamin Gelbtuch and Neil Ellman, each of whom was sentenced to three years in prison in 1979 for Medicaid fraud in New York.

Six years after the pair opened Harmony Healthcare in 2006, the skilled nursing home on Courtland Street in Sarasota was shuttered after the death of a patient revealed widespread problems with the center's care.

With the building now lost to foreclosure and the company run by Gelbtuch and Ellman in bankruptcy, advocates for seniors say the nursing home is a poster child for the sort of problems that can arise from a lack of government oversight.

Meanwhile, state legislators are pushing to further loosen regulation of the nursing home industry and erode the recourse consumers might have, a move opponents fear will open the floodgates for problems like those identified at Harmony.

http://www.heraldtribune.com/article/20130421/ARTICLE/130429959/-1/sports?Title=NEW-Sarasota-nursing-home-case-points-to-problems-with-oversight