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.
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