Woman found dead in retirement facility covered in cockroaches , The Vineyards California Armenian home

NDIANAPOLIS – A woman accused of allowing a Speedway nursing home to use her license to stay open is facing discipline after investigators say a woman living there was found dead and covered in cockroaches.

According to the Indiana Attorney General’s office, Cynthia Jones of Rockville let the now-closed Roland’s Retirement Club in Speedway use her Health Facility Administration (HFA) license to continue running even though she had stopped working there in early 2015.

In Sept. 2017, Speedway Police say they found a woman dead inside one of the rooms at the facility lying on the floor with cockroaches crawling out of her mouth and nose.

Roland’s Retirement Club was closed around two months later.

The facility had nearly 30 residents at the time it shut down and police helped moved residents to other nursing homes.

In a complaint written to the Indiana State Board of Health Facility Administrators, prosecutors say Jones engaged in fraud and failed to make sure the residents of the home were receiving proper care.

A hearing on Jones’ license is set for March 27.

http://www.wibc.com/news/local-news/woman-found-dead-inside-speedway-nursing-home-leads-licensing-complaint

Yuba is GONE!! Ding Dong The Witch is Dead

It is way too late Yuba chased all he wealthy Armenians away, no one donates a dime.

The replacement (no better) and the same inept staff that gets in trouble all the time.

couldn't handle staying around to raise funds for the new memory center.  Word is no one

wants to donate, there may be a few fundraisers but no one cares.  No one to join Ani Guild or

Home Guild, no interest from anyone.

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California Armenian Home, 50 things Nursing Homes will not tell you

50 Secrets a Nursing Home Won't Tell You

What you need to know—but probably don't—to ensure that your loved one is happy, cared for, and safe.  The Californa Armenian Home is a business, there is no support from the Armenian Community financially anymore.  Now that they are taking Medicaid, the staff and residents are 90% non Armenian.  Why would anyone in the Armenian community give money to Yuba and her Croatian buddies.   No more Yuba, every year you dwindle in support, even the Ararat Home in Los Angeles knows the game you are playing. 

You cannot keep the word "Armenian" on the sign and expect to collect over $11 million a year in Medicaid government payments.  Take it down, it is not our hospital anymore, not like it was when we built it for our aging Armenians who witnessed the horrors of Genocide.  That is what it was intended for not for every government hand out.  As such there are only 10% Armenians that are residents.  Everyone in the community knows and most Armenians have started their own nursing homes.     

Sally Llanes/Getty Images

• How do you know it’s time to start looking at nursing homes for a loved one?

"If you have concerns about safety, about his being able to keep track of his medications, about whether he’s eating enough and eating healthfully, he’s probably ready to go. It gets to a point where you have to say, ‘This can’t go on any longer.’ ”—Richard L. Peck, former editor of Long-Term Living magazine and author of The Big Surprise: Caring for Mom and Dad

• "The best time to visit a nursing home you’re considering is 6 p.m. on a Saturday. Dinner has been served, few if any managers will be in the facility, and it’s likely that no marketing people will be there. You’ll get a true picture. Talk to staff and family members of residents about what they like and don’t like.”—A California nursing home administrator

• “Consider the noise level. Most nursing homes have double rooms, with two patients, each with her own TV, often with dueling channels on, blaring. Sometimes you’ll hear odd cries and calls from residents. Older homes have overhead paging systems that everyone can hear; newer ones have wireless devices that are much less obtrusive. Take a moment on your tour to just listen.”—Richard L. Peck

• “What should you look for? I always say staffing, staffing, staffing. Our recommendation for a daytime staff-to-patient ratio is one to five. One should be a direct caregiver, like an aide. We recommend one to ten during the evening shift, and one to 15 overnight. If you have residents with dementia who need lots of monitoring, you need to staff up.”—Robyn Grant, director of public policy and advocacy at the National Consumer Voice for Quality Long-Term Care

• “If it smells like urine, that’s obviously a bad sign. But if all you smell is pine cleaner, I’d be a little suspicious about that, too, wondering what odors it’s covering. What you want the place to smell like is a clean home, with no strong scent that’s good or bad.”—Richard L. Peck

Jacek Fota/Anzenberger/Redux

• Make sure you also visit during mealtime, since in some places it’s so busy that it’s common for residents to not get enough food or drink.

"Otherwise, it may take several weeks for you to figure that out, and your loved one may already have lost weight and be undernourished.”—Charlene Harrington, RN, PhD, professor emerita of sociology and nursing at the UCSF School of Nursing

• “Check out the activity calendar. It shouldn’t have only bingo and movies with popcorn. I personally love to see entertainers listed, especially comedians and musicians. And the musicians should sing more than ‘Row, Row, Row Your Boat’ and other children’s songs.”—Marc Halpert, vice president of business development at Extended Care Consulting in Evanston, Illinois, who works with 15 nursing homes

• “Hospital discharge planners will tell you you’ve got 24 to 48 hours to find a nursing home and get out. That’s not true; they need to give you time to make appropriate arrangements. They’re trying to get you out the door because the hospital is paid a flat fee, so if you stay five days instead of three, it’s going to cost the hospital more money. Take the extra time to find a place that offers high-quality care.”—Charlene Harrington

• “The marketing person or admissions director will probably give you the tour, but try to meet the director of nursing, the administrator, and the executive director too. Ask how long they’ve worked there. Ask how long their predecessors were there. If it’s less than six months, and you see a pattern, that should be a concern; high administrator turnover can be an indicator of a lower quality of care.”—Jody Gastfriend, Vice President of Senior Care Services at Care.com

• "Nonprofit nursing homes and government-owned facilities have better staffing, pay better wages, and offer better quality care than for-profit nursing homes. I analyzed all types of nursing homes across the country, and the large, for-profit chains had the worst staffing and were cited for the highest number of deficiencies and severe deficiencies.”— Charlene Harrington

Photo by Kara Newhouse via Flickr

• I’ve worked at for-profit and nonprofit nursing homes.

"If a resident of a for-profit facility says, ‘I’m a Medicaid recipient, and I need a new battery for my wheelchair,’ I have to go through an extensive process—and, in the end, Medicaid still might not cover it. At a nonprofit, I can just go buy it.”—Matthew Maupin, health facility administrator at Lutheran Life Villages in Fort Wayne, Indiana

• “They say you’re not supposed to become attached, but you can’t help it. You do. A lot of times, the CNAs [certified nursing assistants] are fighting for the resident’s rights. If a resident needs help walking, we’ll be the ones pushing for physical therapy.”—A CNA in Wisconsin

• “There was one lady who came from a very poor family. The only gift they’d been able to buy her growing up was rock candy. Because she remembered that so clearly, every time we would give her a sucker, she was absolutely delighted. So we got a giant bag of suckers and gave her one at least three times a day because we loved to see her eyes light up.”—A CNA in Wisconsin

• “I had a patient with ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s disease. She couldn’t talk, had difficulty swallowing, and was on a pureed diet. But she loved crab Rangoon, and we would order Chinese food. We weren’t supposed to give it to her, but she knew the risks and that’s what she wanted. She was always so thankful, and her family thanked me too. Sometimes, at the end, you have to go for quality of life, not quantity of life.”—Registered nurse who worked in a Massachusetts nursing home for two years

• “Right now, federal law requires 75 hours of initial training for a CNA, though some states require more. Dog groomers get more training; nail technicians get more training.”—Robyn Grant

Photo by Brian Bullock via Flickr

• The staffing information collected by Medicare and included in the Nursing Home Compare database is self-reported and not audited.

"That’s like asking people to self-report their highway driving speeds.”—A California nursing home administrator

• “Many nursing home employees are so poor they receive Medicaid for their own health care. The low salary forces a lot of them to work two jobs, so they may finish the day shift at one nursing home and report to another facility to work the night shift.”—A California nursing home administrator

• “Find out if the nursing home uses agency nurses and how often. Nursing homes usually use them when they’re desperate for staffing. Sometimes, the nurses have never been oriented in that facility, and they come in and have to care for 30 or 40 residents they’ve never met before.”—Registered nurse who worked in a Massachusetts nursing home for two years

• “Some facilities have an unwritten rule that if a nurse or CNA calls in sick, that person is not replaced. That saves facilities money on their largest expense: staffing.”—A California nursing home administrator

• “We have to do something about wages. These are the people who are responsible for the lives of our parents and grandparents, and we’re paying them as little as $8.50 an hour.”—Martin Bayne, a longtime advocate for the aging who entered an assisted living facility at 53 after he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease

Photo by Jeffrey Smith via Flickr

A nursing home should never tell you that you need to hire your own private aide.

"The home is required to provide all necessary care. If you need extra help, administrators are obligated to provide it.”—Eric Carlson, directing attorney with the National Senior Citizens Law Center

• “Nursing homes certified for Medicare and Medicaid are not supposed to discriminate based on ability to pay. But they’re allowed to take only people for whom they can provide adequate care. So if you say your mother can afford only one month of private pay, and someone else says he can do private pay for six months, who do you think they’re going to take?” —Pat McGinnis, executive director of California Advocates for Nursing Home Reform

• “People don’t realize that Medicare does not cover most nursing home stays, just acute-illness episodes [after hospitalization] up to 100 days. If your loved one needs anything more than that, she’s paying out of pocket, almost $90,000 a year—basically until she’s poor and qualifies for Medicaid.”—Richard L. Peck

• “Long-term-care insurance can make sense, but, unfortunately, it’s best to buy it in your 40s, when you have kids to support, college tuition to save for, and the inevitable home and car payments. By the time you really start thinking about it and you’re around 60, you’re talking about $3,000 a year in premiums or more. And then it really pays only $150 a day, which often is not adequate.”—Richard L. Peck

• “In some states, a nursing home can say, ‘We have 100 beds, and we want only 20 of them to be in the Medicaid program.’ So if you run out of money, and those 20 beds are full, you may have to leave, even though you’re in a Medicaid- certified facility. So as you get closer to the time when you need to apply for Medicaid, talk to staff about whether there will be a bed available.”—Robyn Grant

Photo by Susan Sermoneta via Flickr

If your mom goes into a nursing home, it can’t require you to pay out of your pocket for her.

"Still, nursing homes will send relatives a bill and say, ‘You have to pay us,’ and families don’t know—so all too often, they pay.”—Robyn Grant

• “My No. 1 piece of advice? Visit often. Research shows that residents whose families are involved get better care.”—Jody Gastfriend

• “The nursing home has to develop a care plan for each resident. Ask the staff to hold care plan meetings, and make sure you participate. Have them put into the plan any promises they make, even simple things like giving your loved one a baked potato once a week.”—Brian Lee, executive director of Families for Better Care

• “Elect one family member to be the representative to the nursing home, even if that person doesn’t legally have power of attorney. Otherwise, we’re not sure whom to communicate with.”—Matthew Maupin

• “At some nursing homes, your loved one may see a different caregiver almost every day. What you want is the same caregivers assigned to your loved one on an ongoing basis. When that happens, the aides get to know the resident’s needs, and it translates into better care.”•Robyn Grant

Photo by Susan Sermoneta via Flickr

Medication errors are a big issue.

"Residents who are mentally competent should ask before they ingest anything, ‘What is this? How much are you giving me?’ Know what your relative is taking, how often they’re supposed to get it, and who’s giving it to them.”—Pat McGinnis

• “Nursing home doctors can have hundreds of patients; they usually visit each nursing home once a month. So the nurses line up the charts, and the doctors sign a bunch of orders and make quick visits. Most of the medicine practiced in nursing homes is over the phone.”—A California nursing home administrator

• “Families and residents talk themselves out of complaining because they don’t want to create trouble. Remember, the nursing home is getting paid thousands of dollars a month by you or someone on your behalf. You shouldn’t apologize for wanting some attention and a high level of care.”—Eric Carlson

• “Once you go into a nursing home, you probably won’t be able to see your favorite doctor anymore. Usually, the physician assigned to the facility takes over. Ask how often the physician sees residents, what happens if there’s an emergency, and if the physician is easily available.”—Jody Gastfriend

• “Ask about the pain management policy. Some nursing homes are wary about giving strong medications for pain, and unnecessary pain is a common problem. You want to hear that they do take active steps to decrease pain and that they’re not afraid to use narcotic medications in cases of acute need.”—Richard L. Peck

Photo by Diane Cordell via Flickr

When you’re moving in loved ones, make sure they bring their own pillows and their own bedding.

"I’ve even had families bring an entire bed or a much-loved recliner. Whatever they love most in their home, bring those things if you can.”—Marc Halpert

• “Try to display interesting items in the room to stimulate conversation. That way, when a staff member comes into the room, he’s not just talking about care and when the next shower will be. He can ask about your loved one’s military service or the dog she has a picture of.”—Matthew Maupin

• “It’s a good idea not to visit for the first two weeks, especially if your relative has dementia. Just call, or write a letter if you want to. That gives her time to build relationships with the staff and other residents and get used to the fact that this is her home. Otherwise, every time she sees you, she’ll think she’s going home, and when you leave, she’ll get really upset. It ends up taking longer for her to adjust.”—A CNA in Wisconsin

• “This is your loved one’s home. He should be able to get up and go to bed when he wants to, to eat dinner when he wants to. A big difference between a mediocre or bad nursing facility and a good one is the extent to which residents have their preferences accommodated.”—Eric Carlson

• “We can anticipate with reasonable certainty when we’re going to have our next annual inspection. So some facilities staff up and buff up—paint, wash the windows, get flowers—because they know they have company coming.”—A California nursing home administrator

Photo by David Levinson via Flickr

That paperwork we do? It’s really useless.

"The way it’s supposed to work is that every time you do something, you check it off a list. But there’s no time for that. So you do your job all day long, and then, at the end of the day, you try to remember everything you did so you can go back and check each thing.”—A former CNA who worked in nursing homes in North Carolina and Massachusetts

• “Theft and loss are a big problem in nursing homes. Rings are taken off people’s fingers. Or you give your relative a new nightgown for Christmas, and then it’s gone. Make sure you put your loved one’s name on everything, and that everything is listed in inventory and in the records.”—Pat McGinnis

• “Here’s a big secret: Some nursing homes don’t tell families that having a hospice worker come in is an option because the reimbursement rate goes down if the home has to share the money with hospice.”—Diane Carbo, RN, a nurse in California who worked in nursing homes and assisted facilities for over 20 years

• “Some nursing homes don’t have liability insurance, so it’s difficult to make a recovery if your loved one is harmed or killed, even if you have a good case. Also, the way these facilities are set up makes it difficult to recover anything from the owner. Often, the guy who’s making millions from the facility is virtually untouchable.”—Jonathan Rosenfeld, a Chicago attorney who specializes in nursing home cases

• “When you receive your stack of admissions paperwork, you’ll find the nursing home has snuck in these things called binding arbitration agreements. Basically, the home asks you to sign away your constitutional right to due process, your right to sue if anything happens. So don’t sign it, or say you’ll sign it only after your attorney reviews it.”—Brian Lee

Photo by Ann P via Flickr

One of the best-kept secrets is the long-term-care ombudsman program.

"There’s one in every state, and the ombudsman is your personal advocate to help you in these situations and answer your questions. All the services are free.”—Brian Lee

• “The baby boomers as a growing aging population have very different expectations from the residents we were accustomed to taking care of. We’ve had to start serving stir-fry and taco salads in the dining room, and I have residents who come in with iPads and cell phones who listen to rock ’n’ roll and hip-hop music.”—Matthew Maupin

• “One of the big trends in nursing homes is changing the culture to get away from the institutional perception. We don’t use the word facility, we’re a community. We don’t have a dietary department, we have a dining services department. And instead of units, we have neighborhoods.”—Matthew Maupin

• “People have this image of the nursing home as cold and institutional, and they think, ‘I’m not going there.’ But some are excellent, and I’ve thought, ‘I could live here myself.’ There is warmth and support, company, decent food, and activity directors who keep people engaged and active.”—Richard L. Peck

• “The notion that you get to a certain age and lose your capacity couldn’t be further from the truth. All you have to do is sit down and talk to some of our residents, and you’ll be blown away by their knowledge. I played Scrabble against a 107-year-old resident last year. She was one of my most challenging opponents ever.”—Matthew Maupin

© 2014 The Reader's Digest Association, Inc.

California Armenian Home Review, Why are so many Armenians involved with Medicare Fraud?

Joyce Heap was victimized by a Armenian Nursing Home.  Not only was she over medicated, her Medicare Number was charged with drugs she didn't take and no doubt the overages in the hands of the Armenian Organized Crime. 



At another time in her life, Denise Heap might have tossed aside the insurance forms listing the drugs prescribed to her mother.

The“explanation of benefits” forms came like clockwork and didn’t require any action on her part.

But Heap was worried about her mother, Joyce, who was in the end stages of Alzheimer’s disease. Her health had inexplicably declined in the Los Angeles-area nursing home where she’d been living. So in April, when a thick envelope arrived from her mother’s Medicare drug plan, Heap scrutinized it.

What she found was frightening: Her 77-year-old mother was receiving a raft of medications [1]Heap had never seen before.

As Heap began Googling the drugs, she realized something was drastically wrong. Either her mother was being given expensive medications for conditions she didn't have — such as breast cancer, asthma, emphysema and high cholesterol — or something sinister was going on: Someone was using her mother to steal drugs.

“I flipped,” Heap said. Medicare's prescription program, known as Part D, paid for more than “$10,000 worth of meds” in just three months, she said.

She first called Medicare to report her suspicions, she said, then the insurance company that managed her mother’s Medicare drug plan. Neither, she said, seemed very concerned.

“I was like, ‘No. No. No. You have to understand. I am trying to help you guys,’”she said.

Soon, Heap became convinced someone had stolen her mother's identity while she was living at a nursing home run by an Armenian couple. The couple kept moving the location of the nursing home. And Heap believed they had been over-sedating her mother with high doses of antipsychotics, inappropriately treating her blood pressure and allowing bed bugs to feast on her.

“I knew something crooked was going on,” said Heap, 59, who, with her mother, had co-founded a Holocaust education nonprofit in the 1990s to document stories of German resistance to Hitler.

Frustrated, Heap called Los Angeles County sheriff's Sgt. Steve Opferman, head of a task force specializing in prescription drug fraud. As soon as Heap began describing what had happened, Opferman said he knew her mother had been caught up in a fraud scheme involving Armenian organized crime.

Opferman and other investigators say criminals wager that patients and their families will not be like Heap. They bank on the fact that their victims—Medicare beneficiaries — will be too old or too sick to review insurance forms summarizing the medications and services billed in their names. And they count on the tendency of busy family members to give such forms a cursory glance, if that.

“Suffice it to say most people don't pay attention, let alone know what they're looking at,” Opferman said.

But Heap's case, and others like it, shows the important role patients and their families can play in uncovering fraud within Part D. The program now covers 36 million seniors and disabled people and fills 1 in 4 prescriptions nationwide. Last year, it cost taxpayers $62 billion.

In an earlier report [2], ProPublica found that Medicare’s system for pursuing such fraud is so cumbersome and poorly run that schemes can quickly siphon away millions. Tips such as Heap's can come into private insurers, which run Part D for Medicare, to contractors hired by Medicare to spot fraud, or to the U.S. Department of Health Human Services inspector general, which investigates health care fraud. But only a small percentage of cases funneled through this chain are prosecuted.

Reporters, using Medicare’s own data, were able to identify scores of doctors whose prescribing within the program followed known patterns of fraud: the cost of doctors’prescribing jumped dramatically — in some cases by millions of dollars— from one year to the next and they chose brand-name drugs that scammers can easily resell.

Some doctors claimed that they — like some of the patients involved — were unwitting victims of identity theft. In other cases, federal investigators found, the doctors were paid for writing bogus or inappropriate prescriptions.

In a response to these findings, a Medicare official said more focus has been placed on fraud detection within Part D.

The drugs listed on Joyce Heap's explanation of benefits forms are those most-desired in such fraud schemes. They included the asthma drugs Spiriva and Advair Diskus, for which her insurance plan paid nearly $270 a month each, the cholesterol drug Crestor, which cost nearly $170, and the antipsychotic Abilify, for which the plan paid about $920 for a 30-day supply.

Opferman said Heap's call launched an investigation that uncovered a large Part D scheme allegedly connecting the owners of the nursing home to a North Hollywood pharmacy operation, including evidence that other residents' identities were used. A September search of the pharmacy where Heap's mother's prescriptions were filled found evidence that drugs were being relabeled or repackaged for resale, he said.

The doctor who prescribed the drugs has denied prescribing the vast majority of them, Opferman said. The case is now part of an ongoing investigation by California’s Department of Justice and his group, he said.

Opferman said investigators might never have known of the scheme without Heap's tip.

Joyce Heap didn't live long after her daughter unearthed the problems.

She improved briefly after moving to a new nursing home, where a doctor reduced her psychiatric medications, Denise Heap said. But she died of a heart attack on April 21.

In the months following her mother’s death, Heap said, she sent letters alerting Medicare and her mother's insurer to the possible fraud. In July she wrote,“Please note that 100% of the prescriptions charged in April 2013 … are FRAUDULENT.”

Heap said she is “outraged” Medicare didn't follow up and ask detailed questions about her allegations. In fact, it was either her insurer or Medicare— she can't recall which — that recommended she call the local sheriff if she was worried.

“I would have thought immediately they would have gotten on it,” she said.

But Heap said she is mostly tormented that she didn’t know such fraud schemes existed — and that elderly people like her mother could become prey.

“It’s a hard thing to live with,” she said, tearfully. “I feel like I failed.”

http://www.propublica.org/article/caught-up-in-a-medicare-drug-fraud