Miami Springs nursing home with 59 COVID deaths fined $267,000. And it has a new name
The Miami Springs nursing home formerly known as Fair Havens Center has a new name and an unwanted new distinction: It was just hit with the largest fine by federal regulators against a Florida nursing facility since the declaration of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to data from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
A $267,764 fine was levied last month by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services against what is now the Miami Springs Nursing and Rehabilitation Center, on Curtiss Parkway, the tree-lined road that runs through the center of the city. Nationally, it is the 10th largest nursing home fine since the start of the pandemic.
Since the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic on March 11, 2020, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services have imposed fines on nearly 2,200 nursing homes across the country and denied payments, another form of financial penalty, to more than 500 other facilities. The average fine during this time period has been just over $12,000.
Fair Havens changed its name on Jan. 1, predating the fine, according to the Agency for Health Care Administration. Its legal business name is still “Fair Havens Opco, LLC” and it remains a for-profit entity, the Medicare website says.
To date, 59 deaths of residents at the home have been attributed to COVID-19, second-most of any long-term care facility in the state, behind only Hialeah Nursing and Rehabilitation Center with 74 deaths. The spate of deaths at Fair Havens ebbed when the state halted new admissions to the facility for five months last May after an inspection found lax infection controls had created “a fertile ground for the virus to spread.”
At the moment, there is one positive case of COVID-19 — a staffer — at the renamed home.
The Miami Herald previously documented allegations that the facility failed to provide staff with sufficient protective equipment and hadn’t sufficiently segregated residents after they had tested positive for COVID-19 from the rest of the nursing home population, putting both patients and staff at risk. The facility also kept family members uninformed about the status of their loved ones during a time when the state barred any outside visitors. Florida’s industry-wide ban on visitation, later reversed, was meant to stem the spread of the virus.
Florida, which like the federal government monitors care in nursing homes, initially threatened to revoke Fair Havens’ license, but instead fined it $45,000 for COVID-19-related infractions and required the owners to pay a $6,000 fee to cover monitoring costs. The home was also added to the state’s watch list for troubled facilities.
Brian Lee, executive director of Families for Better Care, an advocacy group, and formerly Florida’s long-term care ombudsman, said the latest fine is definitely a “wake-up call” for the facility.
He said in his experience as ombudsman — a position allowing the occupant to visit nursing homes and report on conditions — name changes often occur when a home experiences bad publicity, as Fair Havens did during the heart of the pandemic.
The building that houses the nursing home was originally a luxury hotel and was designed to be the crown jewel in city founder and aviation pioneer Glenn Curtiss’ blueprint for Miami Springs.
The building fell on hard times during the Great Depression and in later years was variously a health retreat run by Dr. John Kellog, the cereal magnate, a home for recovering World War II soldiers and ultimately a nursing home, first run by Lutheran Services for the Elderly and later Philip Esformes, who operated the facility as part of a chain of 15 nursing homes and assisted living facilities. In 2019, Esformes was sentenced to 20 years in prison for a kickback scheme that federal prosecutors described at the time as the largest healthcare scam in U.S. history. A little more than one year later, Esformes was granted clemency by outgoing President Donald Trump three days before Christmas.
Esformes is no longer the owner. The home is now owned by companies connected to Bent Philipson, a nursing home magnate who acquired Fair Havens from Esformes before the pandemic began.
Seeking comment, the Herald tried to contact Philipson and his lawyer, Ed Burnbaum, by phone and email. The efforts were unsuccessful.
The Medicare site listed the one federal fine for Miami Springs but did not provide additional details. Penalties occur when a nursing home receives “a serious health or fire safety citation, or fails to correct a citation for a long period of time,” according to the agency.
Ben Wieder in the McClatchy DC bureau contributed.
This story was originally published May 21, 2021 at 12:05 PM.