In December 2019, Sharon Farrell flew from Florida to visit her brother Stephen at a New Jersey nursing home, where, she said, she found “disgusting” conditions. “I told the nurse, ‘I am calling the state,'” she said. “I’m paying $9,000 a month, and I wouldn’t let my dog live like this.”
Farrell said that four months later, as Covid-19 was spreading rapidly, she repeatedly called the facility to ask how her brother was doing. When she finally reached someone, she said, she was told he was fine. Within a few days, however, he was dead.
It has been 19 months since the discovery of 17 bodies in a tiny morgue at the Andover Subacute II nursing home in Sussex County, New Jersey, in April 2020. The federal government fined the owners $221,115 for not being in “substantial compliance,” and the attorney general’s office began an investigation.
But the owners are still in business. They changed the names of Andover and its sister facility and installed new signs out front. As of Friday, there were 25 residents of Andover with Covid, according to state data.
And the owners are still being paid by Medicare and Medicaid, the taxpayer-funded programs that pay most costs for U.S. nursing home operators — even though one of the owners, Louis Schwartz, helped run a chain called Skyline Healthcare, which collapsed in 2019 amid accusations of neglect and financial mismanagement, which the chain denied.
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