Another Nursing Home Teeters

Unless a last-minute suitor appears, New Haven stands to lose another 120 nursing home beds and 150 health-care jobs, the latest example of a Medicaid-related urban trend.

That’ll happen if University Skilled Nursing & Rehabilitation closes its doors.

The home (pictured), at 915 Ella Grasso Blvd., has been under court receivership since Jan. 10. So have three other Connecticut homes owned by the same company.

The receiver wrote in a brief filed last week that the owner’s four Connecticut nursing homes are basically ​“insolvent” and are facing combined annual losses of up to $8 million. The receiver seeks to have a court allow the state to close the homes and find new beds for the patients elsewhere. Over 470 beds and about 400 jobs are at stake at the four homes.

The owner, Maryland-based Formations Capital/Omega Healthcare Investors, referred questions to the court-appointed receiver, Phyllis A. Belmonte, who didn’t respond to a request for comment.

The state closed one New Haven nursing home last year, West Rock Health Care Facility. It has temporarily been keeping alive another home, in the Hill, the Jewish Home for the Aged, pending a rescue by a potential buyer; the 226-bed Jewish Home declared bankruptcy in February.

Now the receiver is scheduled to ask a judge at a March 22 hearing to approve having University Skilled Nursing on the Boulevard (previously known as Haven Health) closed. The state Department of Social Services (DSS) would be responsible for finding new beds for the patients there. The receiver wrote in a March 10 brief that DSS concluded it can find ​“adequate” beds within a 10-mile radius for the patients at all four of Formation Capital’s Connecticut homes, which have a total of 472 beds. (The other homes: Bishops Corner Skilled Nursing & Rehabilitation in West Hartford; Rocky Hill; and Soundview in West Haven.)

First, though, the court will see if any potential buyers show up Friday for an 11:15 a.m. court hearing in Hartford. (Update: Two potential buyers expressed interest at Friday’s hearing, according to this article in CT Mirror.)

Both Omega and New England Health Care Employees Union District 1199, the union representing the homes’ workers, are asking the court to delay the homes’ closure to allow more time to find new owners.

Click here to read a motion filed by Omega objecting to the state’s approach.

New Haven State Rep. Pat Dillon, too, called for DSS to keep the New Haven home open.

“It’s not an old building, and many patients and workers there live in New Haven,” she said. She called the disappearance of 421 beds in New Haven over the past decade ​“a dramatic loss of capacity. People thrive better if their families can visit, and the lack of adequate transportation makes it difficult for workers to get to good paying jobs when those jobs leave the city.”

“The facilities have been hemorrhaging financially, and the receiver’s viability report was not optimistic,” said state Department of Social Services (DSS) spokesman David Dearborn. ​“At the same time, we understand that the receiver has been amenable to hearing from prospective buyers — subject of Friday’s hearing.

DSS has told the receiver that it’s confident it can find new beds for all the affected patients within a 10-mile radius of the homes that would be shut down.

The union representing most of the homes’ workers criticized DSS’s quest to shut the homes, on several grounds, most related to the plight of nursing homes based in cities.

Ten miles sounds close by, but for seniors in cities whose families lack cars, that’s too far, said District 1199 spokeswoman Deborah Chernoff.

“There’s a particular problem when you close urban nursing homes,” where most patients are poor, Chernoff said.

“You’re taking people out of their community, the reverse of what they want to do with long-term care.

“You see what happens when these nursing homes close. People sit in a lobby with all their possessions in a garbage bag. They get in a car. They don’t know where they’re going,” she said. ​“The nursing home operators with empty beds cherry-pick residents based on how expensive they’re going to be to care for — people who are uncomplicated from a care perspective. The people who are left are always the oldest, the sickest, the frailest, the poorest. They may not have a family member to advocate for them.”

Only 54 of the ​“nearby” beds actually fall within New Haven city limits — and 47 of them are at the Jewish Home, which may soon close, Chernoff noted.

Click here to read the list of nearby beds identified in the receiver’s motion.

Chernoff argued that DSS should hold onto homes in receivership for considerably longer than a few months, and that the state should give urban nursing homes extra home to make up for their high reliance on Medicaid patients, similar to a ​“disproportionate share” reimbursement given to city-based hosptials. At New Haven’s University Skilled Nursing facility, 81 percent of the patients are on Medicaid, 11 percent higher than the state average. Urban homes like that one and the Jewish Home find that, unlike their suburban counterparts, they don’t have enough paying customers to make up for money lost on Medicaid patients.

DSS’s Dearbon said the agency has been discussing these broader issues with the union. DSS oversees the spending of about $1.3 billion a year on 17,500 long-term nursing-home residents, he said. (The feds reimburse the state for about half that money.)

In a supplemental court filing this week, the receiver reported that the four Omega-owned homes combined lost $6.5 million in 2009.

The homes’ problems stem not just from trends affecting all similar facilities, but from their past ownership by Haven Health. That company went bankrupt and an executive went to jail after siphoning off millions of dollars for private, unrelated use.

Chernoff was also critical of the homes’ current owners and its management company, Genesis Health Care. ​“They abandoned these homes,” she said.