1 week Ago By David Matthau
From Camden and Cherry Hill to Trenton and the Jersey Shore, what about life in New Jersey do you want WHYY News to cover? Let us know. Residents of a South Jersey nursing home endured squalid and dismal conditions while the operators of the facility improperly collected millions of dollars in Medicaid funding through an elaborate scheme that lasted for decades, according to a report released Thursday by the state’s chief watchdog. Kevin Walsh, the acting state comptroller , said a five-year investigation of South Jersey Extended Care in Bridgeton, the lowest-rated nursing home in the state, found that Steven Krausman and his brother-in-law Michael Konig, who oversaw the facility, and Konig’s cousin, Mark Weisz, the owner on paper, constructed a fraudulent operation designed to maximize profits and minimize accountability.
“They exploited the poor, the sick, the elderly, people with disabilities, people with addictions and residents who had no family to look after them. They profited on the despair of people who wanted better care but had no way to get it,” said Walsh. The Office of the State Comptroller on Thursday, with the approval of the state attorney general, announced it is suspending those responsible for this conduct from New Jersey Medicaid within 60 days, including South Jersey Extended Care, Sterling Manor Nursing Center (under the same ownership), Konig, Krausman, Weisz, and their related entities and partners.
“This was a massive scam, perpetrated for years, these individuals were able to amass a fortune by pretending to be independent parties,” he said. “In reality, they operated as one unit.” He said Krausman and Konig found a straw man, Weisz, who was willing to play the part of owner in three nursing homes that Walsh said Konig had owned in the 1990s, but they were banned from owning them in Massachusetts and Connecticut due to poor quality of care.
He said Weisz was brought in to keep regulators from discovering Krausman and Konig were actually still running the nursing homes in New Jersey. Walsh said, “South Jersey Extended Care received $35 million in Medicaid funding, and they sent over $38 million to their own businesses in a five-year period. They were owner and vendor, seller and buyer, vendor and customer, but because they had installed Weisz as the straw owner, for decades they had plausible deniability.
” In nursing homes, impoverished live final days on pennies A half-century-old bit of American bureaucracy is leaving hundreds of thousands of nursing home residents in an unthinkable bind: Living on as little as $30 a month. 2 years ago Investigators found Krausman and Konig charged South Jersey Extended Care over $10 million for staff over two years, but the facility was always short-staffed. Walsh said the staff that was hired was unqualified.
“The director of nursing wasn’t a registered nurse, the social worker, when there was one, wasn’t actually a social worker,” he said. He said a huge amount of money was also made by Krausman and Konig through a medical supply business they owned, consulting and management fees and inflated costs for food. “They also profited from renting nursing home properties to themselves,” he said.
The investigation found Krausman and Konig were the operators and managers of nine other nursing homes throughout the Garden State. Walsh said the report explains why so much money is spent on nursing homes in Jersey, yet some continue to be very low-rated and provide poor quality care. The report recommends the legislature should enact reforms to guard against fraud, waste, and abuse in nursing homes.
“As a state we have to do a much better job of vetting owners, cutting through intentionally opaque ownership structures, and understanding who is really making the decisions for the nursing home,” he said. Repeated requests to South Jersey Extended Care for comment were not immediately answered. Get daily updates from WHYY News! The free WHYY News Daily newsletter delivers the most important local stories to your inbox.
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