TRENTON — The proprietors called their business the Garden Adult Medical Day Care center, but their frail and elderly clients got little in the way of medical attention, according to state investigators. As a result of an investigation into Garden’s billing practices, the facility’s owners, Marat Zeydelis, Zoya Halal and Larisa Melnik, agreed to pay a $1.6 million fine...
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Mark Anderson, the Medicaid Inspector General.TRENTON — The proprietors called their business the Garden Adult Medical Day Care center, but their frail and elderly clients got little in the way of medical attention, according to state investigators.
As a result of an investigation into Garden’s billing practices, the facility’s owners, Marat Zeydelis, Zoya Halal and Larisa Melnik, agreed to pay a $1.6 million fine and give up their business, according to a settlement announced Wednesday by the State Office of the Comptroller.
The owners also agreed to a five-year suspension from Medicaid, the government-funded health insurance program for the poor.
The agreement did not require the owners admit any wrongdoing, and in a statement through their attorney, Robert Fogg, they stressed "not one instance of Medicaid fraud was found."
"Garden denies that there was any form of Medicaid fraud in its operations, and it vigorously denies that any patient’s health status was ever at risk," Fogg said in a statement last night.
The statement said the state "damaged" the reputation of Garden’s owners by assuming wrongfully they had committed fraud because their employees did not detail every patient interaction. "No medical day care center in New Jersey is required to document its activities ... to every patient, which would require written notations every time a patient was escorted to the toilet, assisted with eating, or helped out of their chair," according to the statement.
The state alleged the owners of the facility, located on Broadway in the city’s north ward, wrongly pocketed $1.87 million in Medicaid claims for services it never provided to some 50 patients, such as testing blood pressure and monitoring blood sugar levels and dispensing medications. The settlement reduces the penalty to $1.6 million.
"We are pleased to have secured the return of $1.6 million to a program funded by New Jersey’s taxpayers," said Comptroller Matthew Boxer. "Equally as important, we have removed from the Medicaid program a business that was failing to provide crucial health services for which it was being paid."
Previous coverage:
• Newark adult day care is ordered to pay $5.6M for submitting false Medicaid claims
• N.J. adult medical day centers still in danger of closing despite reduction in cuts
