Transparency Needed
Private equity investors and real estate moguls use nursing home properties. They manipulate the financial health of the operation. The owners borrow against, leverage, and divert tax payer funds via Medicare/Medicaid to shell companies or related entities. We need transparency to follow the money and hold people accountable for abuse and neglect.
All Year Holdings will sell its Brooklyn apartment portfolio to Rubin “Rubie” Schron’s Cammeby’s International Group and Avi Philipson’s Graph Group, in a deal that should allow the struggling All Year to exit bankruptcy. Graph and Cammeby will buy the restructured All Year in exchange for $60 million. $40 million in cash. $20 million in promissory notes from the joint venture.
Where did the cash come from? Did it come from the bailout money? Will we ever know?
SavaSeniorCare
Cammeby was founded in 1967 by Schron, who once tried to buy the Empire State Building and was a defendant in a lawsuit from survivors of the fire in a Bronx apartment building that killed 17 people on Jan. 8. Rubin Schron owns and controls SavaSeniorCare nursing home chain. SavaSeniorCare recently agreed to resolve a False Claims Act.
SavaSeniorCare LLC and related entities (Sava) agreed to pay $11.2 million to resolve the False Claims Act case. The case involved Medicare billing for services that were not reasonable, necessary or skilled. The settlement resolved allegations that Sava billed the Medicare and Medicaid programs for grossly substandard skilled nursing services. Sava currently owns and operates SNFs across the country.
Philipson Family
Philipson, who runs Graph Group, operates nursing homes like his father, Bent Philipson, who founded a nursing facility consulting firm, Philosophy Care Centers. The elder Philipson has invested in multiple long-term care facilities across New York and New Jersey. The elder Philipson is also a director at Graph Group, according to Open Corporates.
The two Philipsons had stakes in Cold Spring Hills Center for Nursing & Rehabilitation through SentosaCare, which was found to have “knowingly benefited” from labor that violated the federal Trafficking Victims Protection Act. The company imposed large financial penalties to force more than 200 underpaid Filipino nurses to keep working at the poorly-rated nursing home in Long Island, N.Y, Newsday reported.