Last week’s article by Jack Styler on the substandard care at the nursing home at Seashore Point in Provincetown, now formally called AdviniaCare at Provincetown, was one of the more disturbing stories we’ve reported in these pages.
For more than 50 years, the Outer Cape’s only nursing home was known as Cape End Manor. In spite of the somewhat unfortunate name and recurring financial problems, the home was a beloved local institution.
Cape End Manor was owned and managed by the town of Provincetown, and the cost of maintaining the home increasingly outpaced the revenue it generated. By the 2000s, the deficits were approaching $1 million a year, and the old building was in such terrible shape that it needed to be completely replaced.
In 2008, Cape End Manor officially closed, and the 37 residents were moved to a new building called Seashore Point, developed and operated by a nonprofit corporation, Deaconess Abundant Life Communities, which had taken over ownership in 2006.
But Deaconess couldn’t balance the books either, and in 2019, under financial pressure, it sold the nursing home and the attached independent-living condominiums to three private investors, Benjamin Berkowitz, David Berkowitz, and Yosef Meystel.
According to the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), which collects data on and rates nursing homes, Benjamin Berkowitz is an owner of 15 homes with an average rating of 1.8 stars out of 5. Seashore Point gets a 2-star rating. Four of Berkowitz’s homes have an “abuse flag,” meaning that residents have been harmed by shoddy care in the last year.
David Berkowitz is an owner of 66 nursing homes with an average rating of 2 stars; 22 of his homes have abuse flags. Yosef Meystel appears to be an owner of at least 105 homes under different names, although the details in the federal database are murky. Forty-eight of Meystel’s nursing homes get one star, the lowest possible CMS rating, and 29 of them have an abuse flag.
Why are these investors buying up money-losing nursing homes? Since 2000, “private-equity investment in nursing homes has grown from five billion to a hundred billion dollars,” investigative journalist Yasmin Rafiei wrote in a 2022 New Yorker article. In the name of “efficiency,” the new owners cut nursing staff and other caregivers drastically to drive up profits. Meanwhile, residents are bathed less, they fall more, they suffer dehydration, malnutrition, more pain, and more infections.
In 2019, researchers from the University of Pennsylvania studied the effects of nursing home ownership on residents. They examined more than 100 purchases and found that “when private-equity firms acquired nursing homes, deaths among residents increased by an average of ten per cent,” Rafiei wrote. Charlene Harrington, an emeritus professor of nursing at the University of California, said of these understaffed homes, “It’s criminal.”
Jack Styler continues his investigation of Seashore Point’s finances this week. As Kristin Hatch, a former employee there, told Styler when he called her to confirm stories of residents being neglected and harmed, “It’s about time.”
