Squalid conditions and substandard care went hand-in-hand with massive fraud at a New Jersey nursing home that bilked Medicaid of millions, state officials said in a scathing, 52-page report released Thursday.
South Jersey Extended Care (SJEC) in Bridgeton, N.J., bore the brunt of the excoriation, with officials alleging nursing home’s owners pocketed tens of millions of dollars in Medicaid funding between April 2018 and March 2023 while forcing residents to live with “neglect, abuse, unsanitary conditions, and inadequate medical care,” the Medicaid Fraud Division of the Office of the State Comptroller (OSC) said in its report.
The state has suspended the nursing home, its owners and related entities from Medicaid, effective in 60 days.
On paper, Extended Care’s owner was Mordechay “Mark” Weisz, but he was nothing but a “straw owner who yielded all control to his cousin, Michael Konig, and Konig’s brother-in-law, Steven Krausman,” the OSC said. “Konig and Krausman were in charge of SJEC finances, operations, and administration, signing the checks, making the decisions, and enriching themselves with public funds — to the detriment of SJEC residents.”
During the years in question, SJEC took in $35.6 million in Medicaid funds but paid $38.9 million to businesses owned and controlled by the brothers-in-law, the OSC found.
Ignoring state and federal laws requiring nursing homes to disclose transactions with vendors that have common ownership or control, Krausman and Konig were able to “avoid scrutiny and maximize their profits,” the report said. In so doing, they drained the operation of nearly all its cash.
“This was a massive scam, perpetrated for years,” Acting State Comptroller Kevin Walsh said in a statement. “These individuals were able to amass a fortune by pretending to be independent parties. In reality, they operated as one unit, providing terrible care to the sick, the elderly, and the poor, so they could make big profits.”
All the while, residents suffered. There was a bedroom that reeked of urine and had a catheter bag lying on the floor, a toilet containing “brown debris and paper products” with no running water, and medical needs that went undocumented or unmet.
One resident with dementia was confined to the bedroom via a trash bag tied to the door handle. In another incident, a staff member “manhandled” a resident who fell out of a wheelchair and was hospitalized with an abdominal injury, inspectors found.
While the three men involved could not be reached, their attorneys had told the OSC that the facility’s previous, persistent one-star rating — some of what sparked the state’s investigation in the first place — had edged up to two stars.
The brothers-in-law had already been barred in the 1990s from owning nursing homes in Connecticut and Massachusetts after “severe deficiencies” were found, the OSC said. In New York, Konig had been dubbed a “landlord from hell” by the Daily News back in 2002.