California Armenian Home, Arrests of Nursing Home Employees of a Jewish operated Nursing Home

The laws in California are stiffening up to protect the most vulnerable of our society (our elderly) more funds will be appropriated for home health care in the privacy of a citizen's home instead at the hands of those that are incompetent.

Every Armenian in Central California has been bothered to donate funds to the California Armenian Home but the word is out that this is not an Armenian Facility.  Conversely, countless attempts by the aging Ani Guild and Home Guild to recruit new members has failed, no one under the age of 60 gives a dam about this home.  Yuba has destroyed the reputation with her rude and unprofessional behavior toward members of the Armenian Community which has resulted in the community freezing out donations to this Medicaid nightmare. 

 

There are more Armenians on the board, and in the Guild than there are residents in the home, approximately 20 members and there are only 15 Armenians in the facility.  They cannot raise funds anymore, because Yuba's reputation precedes her, kicking out Armenian physicians, vendors and families that built the home.   Starting with former Sheriff Steve Magarian's unfortunate experience with the home to Yuba's self dealings with her Croatian buddies at L and J Rehab to the tune of $900K per year.  To the non-Armenan administrative staff that Yuba hand picks so no one can tell the community about the flaws in the everyday operation. 

 

To Yuba;  Hopefully soon you will retire to your house in San Diego County, there may be time for the Armenians to re market and fix the home to it's original intent "For Armenians by Armenians" The proof is in the donations that are barely under $500K down 70%, it barely covers your salary and bonus.  However, with the nice kick back you get from J and J Rehab it makes it worthwhile.  The best thing is for the home to be sold as there is no way to bring back the Armenian money and support.  The hey day is over and the new crop of nursing homes that are top notch are on the elite part of Fresno and have wealthy cash payors and MANY wealthy Armenians who don't want to live in that sorry sad place you have created.  

 

NYS AG Announces Arrests Of Nursing Home Employees And Lawsuit Against The Home's Owners Alleging Pattern Of Neglect

"Employee Negligence Caused The Death Of A 72 Year-Old Female Resident And Severe Injuries To Another Resident; Administrator, And Other Employees Attempted Cover Up; While Home’s Owners Diverted $60M In Medicaid Funds To Line Their Pockets."

A.G. Schneiderman Announces Arrests Of Suffolk County Nursing Home Employees And Lawsuit Against The Home's Owners Alleging Pattern Of Neglect
Employee Negligence Caused The Death Of A 72 Year-Old Female Resident And Severe Injuries To Another Resident; Administrator, And Other Employees Attempted Cover Up; While Home’s Owners Diverted $60M In Medicaid Funds To Line Their Pockets
Schneiderman: We Will Not Tolerate The Denial Of Life-Saving Treatment And Persistent Neglect Of Nursing Home Residents, Especially While The Owners Line Their Pockets With Millions Of Dollars Intended For Vital Resident Care

NEW YORK – Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman today announced the arrests of nine employees of the Medford Multicare Center for Living, Inc. in Medford, New York. Seven of the arrests are in connection with the 2012 death of a 72-year-old resident who was at the facility for what was supposed to be temporary rehabilitation. The corporation operating the home and the facility’s top administrator were also charged with trying to cover up the circumstances surrounding the death. The Attorney General separately filed a civil lawsuit today charging the home’s owners with fraud, based on a long history of criminal conduct by employees of the home, and corporate looting.
“Nursing home residents are among our state’s most vulnerable citizens,” said Attorney General Schneiderman. “Today’s arrests and lawsuit send a message that we will not tolerate anyone being neglected or denied life-saving medical treatment while individuals line their own pockets with tens of millions of dollars that Medicaid intended to provide resident care. We must and will do everything in our power to protect our vulnerable nursing home residents from being preyed upon by those who are entrusted with their care, yet fail to fulfill their duties to provide necessary care.”
The felony complaint charges Kethlie Joseph, 61, of Brentwood, with Criminally Negligent Homicide for the death of a 72-year-old resident who was residing at Medford Multicare Center. Joseph, a licensed professional trained in administering treatment to ventilator-dependent residents, admitted to never reading a doctor’s orders requiring the resident to be connected to a ventilator machine at night. As a result, the resident was not connected to the ventilator when she went to sleep, and she died that night. Joseph not only ignored alarms for more than two hours, but also ignored messages to her pager when the resident stopped breathing. Furthermore, video surveillance captured Joseph walking toward her office and not reappearing until hours later. Only after an unassigned nurse’s aide finally went to check on the resident did she receive medical attention, but by then, she had likely been dead for some time.
Four additional licensed employees of the nursing staff were also charged in connection with the resident’s death. They are:

• Kimberly Lappe, 31, of Medford, a registered nurse who also failed to respond to the visual and audio alarms for almost two hours despite being inches away from the monitors. Despite video evidence to the contrary, Lappe also falsely claimed in notes written a day after the incident that nurses had responded to the alarms and that the resident was in stable condition.
   
• Victoria Caldwell, 50, of Medford, a licensed practical nurse who claimed to investigators that the resident was alive and “looked up at me” when in fact the resident had likely been dead for some time.
   
• Christina Corelli, 37, of East Patchogue, an aide who falsely claimed that the resident’s respiratory alarms were not beeping and that the resident was breathing normally when records show that the alarm system had been activated for the entire time Corelli was in the room with the resident.
   
• Patricia DiGiovanni, 62, of Port Jefferson, an aide who was assigned to sit at the resident’s bedside but did not respond to alarms ringing at the resident’s bedside.

Medford Multicare Center’s licensed administrator, David Fielding, 56, of West Lido Beach, and its director of respiratory therapy, Christine Boylan, 49, of Mastic, were also arrested and charged with concealing computer records documenting the alarms that signified the resident’s distress from the NYS Department of Health (DOH) during the course of its investigation, in an attempt to cover up the incident. An anonymous Medford whistleblower later informed authorities of the circumstances.
In addition to these seven employees charged in connection with the death of the resident and the cover up of the circumstances surrounding it, other employees were arrested today for their roles in separate incidents. Yolanda Monsalvo, 47, of Nesconset and Catherine Reyes, 49, of Ridge, were both charged with Falsifying Business Records in the First Degree and Willful Violation of the Health Laws for neglecting other residents and providing false statements to conceal the neglect. A resident with dementia in Monsalvo’s care sustained a traumatic head injury and a broken arm when Monsalvo left the building instead of monitoring the resident; a resident assigned to Reyes’s care was utterly neglected by Reyes to the point that he was found in deplorable and dangerously unsanitary conditions.
All the criminal charges brought today are merely accusations, and defendants are presumed innocent until and unless proven guilty.
In a civil suit filed separately today against the owners of the Medford Multicare Center, Attorney General Schneiderman detailed an extensive pattern of resident neglect and systematic corporate looting. Since 2008, an additional 17 licensed and certified employees of the Medford facility have been convicted of neglect and the falsification of records in an attempt to cover up abuse and neglect. Six of the 17 convictions arose out of hidden camera investigations conducted by the Attorney General’s Medicaid Fraud Control Unit.
The civil complaint details how Medford’s owners lined their pockets with millions in Medicaid funds while turning a blind eye to suffering caused by the persistent neglect of the home’s residents by senior management and staff. Since opening Medford in 2003, the owners systemically looted the facility by paying themselves at least $60 million, representing 22% of the Medicaid funding they received in that time. In the same 10-year period:

• 17 nurses and aides pled guilty to neglect and falsifying records;
   
• the New York State Department of Health cited the nursing home with 130 violations of state regulations designed to ensure adequate care to nursing home residents. In two of those instances, DOH found that the home placed its residents in “immediate jeopardy” of “serious injury, harm, impairment and death;” and
   
• 5,000 incidents and accidents occurred at the facility since 2008, averaging 20 per week; only 60 of the 5,000 were reported to the New York State Department of Health as required by law. 

The Attorney General’s civil suit also describes how, rather than investing in better staffing and improved supervision to remedy the longstanding history of neglect and dangerously inadequate care, the home’s owners slashed salaries and supplies. Meanwhile, they regularly paid themselves nearly as much in salary as they paid to all 400-plus employees combined. The complaint alleges that the owners failed in their obligations to ensure proper care for residents and siphoned millions of Medicaid dollars intended to provide necessary care and improve residents’ quality of life.
The Attorney General would like to thank the New York State Department of Health for referring these matters to the Office and for its assistance in conducting the investigations. The Attorney General would also like to thank the New York State Police for its assistance in processing the arrests of the defendants.
The cases were investigated by Senior Special Investigator Dawn Scandaliato, Senior Special Investigator Regina Hogan and Special Investigator Jessica Toritto, under the supervision of Supervising Special Investigator Greg Muroff and MFCU Deputy Chief Investigator Kenneth Morgan, and Karen Patterson, RN, Confidential Medical Analyst and Pedro Villegas, Confidential Systems Analyst. Forensic audit work was performed by Milan Shah, Associate Special Auditor, Joanna-Joy Volo, Associate Special Auditor Investigator, and Theresa White, Supervising Auditor, under the supervision of Michael LaCasse, Chief Auditor for Civil Enforcement.
The criminal and civil investigations were conducted by Special Assistant Attorneys General Veronica Bindrim-MacDevitt and Sally G. Blinken, under the supervision of Jane Zwirn-Turkin, Deputy Regional Director of the Hauppauge Regional Office, Thomas O’Hanlon, Chief of Criminal Investigations-Downstate, Assistant Deputy Attorney General Paul J. Mahoney, Acting Director Amy Held and Executive Deputy Attorney General for Criminal Justice Kelly Donovan.

Schneiderman does not name the nursing home owners in his press release, but Newsday's story on the arrests and lawsuit does:

…But the owners -- Mordechai Klein, Norman Rausman, Martin Rausman, Michael Rausman, Henry Rausman and Mendel Aschkenazi -- have withdrawn more than "$60 million in profit sharing, employee loans, unearned exorbitant salaries and purported charitable contributions to their own family-run private foundations," the suit said.

California Armenian Home, Medicare Fraud and Armenian Organized Crime

Joyce Heap, lived in a home operated by Armenians in North Hollywood
Not only was this poor woman overmedicated but they were charging her Medicare account with drugs
that were not even used by Mrs. Heap.  This is a good reminder to read the statement of benefits from Medicare
you may think it doesn't matter, after all it is the government paying for it.  But Medicare fraud harms everyone, in October 2010 the largest Russian and Armenian ring of Medicare fraud $60 million was gathered up by the FBI.  There is such little oversight on the people in these homes that administer the drugs to the patient via unit dose dispenseries that are never on site.  They usually deliver the drug and it's up to the honesty of the staff to see that the people actually get their proper medication.  California Armenian Home has many people that are over medicated on anti-psychotic medication, their care in the skilled nursing section is not "skilled" but operated by too many low wage, low educated LVNs with barely 12 month certification licenses.  They need to put cam recorders on them when they are dispensing the drugs.  This poor woman.



At another time in her life, Denise Heap might have tossed aside the insurance forms listing the drugs prescribed to her mother.

The“explanation of benefits” forms came like clockwork and didn’t require any action on her part.

But Heap was worried about her mother, Joyce, who was in the end stages of Alzheimer’s disease. Her health had inexplicably declined in the Los Angeles-area nursing home where she’d been living. So in April, when a thick envelope arrived from her mother’s Medicare drug plan, Heap scrutinized it.

What she found was frightening: Her 77-year-old mother was receiving a raft of medications [1]Heap had never seen before.

As Heap began Googling the drugs, she realized something was drastically wrong. Either her mother was being given expensive medications for conditions she didn't have — such as breast cancer, asthma, emphysema and high cholesterol — or something sinister was going on: Someone was using her mother to steal drugs.

“I flipped,” Heap said. Medicare's prescription program, known as Part D, paid for more than “$10,000 worth of meds” in just three months, she said.

She first called Medicare to report her suspicions, she said, then the insurance company that managed her mother’s Medicare drug plan. Neither, she said, seemed very concerned.

“I was like, ‘No. No. No. You have to understand. I am trying to help you guys,’”she said.

Soon, Heap became convinced someone had stolen her mother's identity while she was living at a nursing home run by an Armenian couple. The couple kept moving the location of the nursing home. And Heap believed they had been over-sedating her mother with high doses of antipsychotics, inappropriately treating her blood pressure and allowing bed bugs to feast on her.

“I knew something crooked was going on,” said Heap, 59, who, with her mother, had co-founded a Holocaust education nonprofit in the 1990s to document stories of German resistance to Hitler.

Frustrated, Heap called Los Angeles County sheriff's Sgt. Steve Opferman, head of a task force specializing in prescription drug fraud. As soon as Heap began describing what had happened, Opferman said he knew her mother had been caught up in a fraud scheme involving Armenian organized crime.

Opferman and other investigators say criminals wager that patients and their families will not be like Heap. They bank on the fact that their victims—Medicare beneficiaries — will be too old or too sick to review insurance forms summarizing the medications and services billed in their names. And they count on the tendency of busy family members to give such forms a cursory glance, if that.

“Suffice it to say most people don't pay attention, let alone know what they're looking at,” Opferman said.

But Heap's case, and others like it, shows the important role patients and their families can play in uncovering fraud within Part D. The program now covers 36 million seniors and disabled people and fills 1 in 4 prescriptions nationwide. Last year, it cost taxpayers $62 billion.

In an earlier report [2], ProPublica found that Medicare’s system for pursuing such fraud is so cumbersome and poorly run that schemes can quickly siphon away millions. Tips such as Heap's can come into private insurers, which run Part D for Medicare, to contractors hired by Medicare to spot fraud, or to the U.S. Department of Health Human Services inspector general, which investigates health care fraud. But only a small percentage of cases funneled through this chain are prosecuted.

Reporters, using Medicare’s own data, were able to identify scores of doctors whose prescribing within the program followed known patterns of fraud: the cost of doctors’prescribing jumped dramatically — in some cases by millions of dollars— from one year to the next and they chose brand-name drugs that scammers can easily resell.

Some doctors claimed that they — like some of the patients involved — were unwitting victims of identity theft. In other cases, federal investigators found, the doctors were paid for writing bogus or inappropriate prescriptions.

In a response to these findings, a Medicare official said more focus has been placed on fraud detection within Part D.

The drugs listed on Joyce Heap's explanation of benefits forms are those most-desired in such fraud schemes. They included the asthma drugs Spiriva and Advair Diskus, for which her insurance plan paid nearly $270 a month each, the cholesterol drug Crestor, which cost nearly $170, and the antipsychotic Abilify, for which the plan paid about $920 for a 30-day supply.

Opferman said Heap's call launched an investigation that uncovered a large Part D scheme allegedly connecting the owners of the nursing home to a North Hollywood pharmacy operation, including evidence that other residents' identities were used. A September search of the pharmacy where Heap's mother's prescriptions were filled found evidence that drugs were being relabeled or repackaged for resale, he said.

The doctor who prescribed the drugs has denied prescribing the vast majority of them, Opferman said. The case is now part of an ongoing investigation by California’s Department of Justice and his group, he said.

Opferman said investigators might never have known of the scheme without Heap's tip.

Joyce Heap didn't live long after her daughter unearthed the problems.

She improved briefly after moving to a new nursing home, where a doctor reduced her psychiatric medications, Denise Heap said. But she died of a heart attack on April 21.

In the months following her mother’s death, Heap said, she sent letters alerting Medicare and her mother's insurer to the possible fraud. In July she wrote,“Please note that 100% of the prescriptions charged in April 2013 … are FRAUDULENT.”

Heap said she is “outraged” Medicare didn't follow up and ask detailed questions about her allegations. In fact, it was either her insurer or Medicare— she can't recall which — that recommended she call the local sheriff if she was worried.

“I would have thought immediately they would have gotten on it,” she said.

But Heap said she is mostly tormented that she didn’t know such fraud schemes existed — and that elderly people like her mother could become prey.

“It’s a hard thing to live with,” she said, tearfully. “I feel like I failed.”

http://www.propublica.org/article/caught-up-in-a-medicare-drug-fraud

Yuba is due to renew her license this year, lets hope she moves on and takes her Croatian buddies at J and L Rehabiliation with her.   Sooner or later they will have to sell the home or replace Yuba.  Hopefully it's done at the same time as there is no interest level in the Armenian community in this shameful place.  1) Donations from Armenians have shrunk to nothing 2) There are 150 beds combined at this nursing home there are barely 14 Armenian residences in both sections  3)  Most people are opting for home health care  4) Yuba has chased Armenians away, because either they don't accept their insurance or she has the bed reserved for a MediCal patient  5)  Young Armenians are not interested in joining the Ani Guild or Home Guild because we all know the home is anti-Armenian  6) Yuba and Jan will not hire Armenians to work there, the only ones are new immigrants that are not a part of the main community and are desperate for work   7) Yuba is a liar and scapegoat for the do nothing board.   8) Yuba's reputation precedes her in our community, we all know about Yuba.