Lansing — Attorney General Dana Nessel is suing a southeast Michigan nursing home operator, alleging he took roughly $111 million in Medicaid reimbursements while failing to comply with minimum staffing requirements 96% of the time across nine facilities.
The suit, which alleges “failure of care” by Pioneer Health Care Management and its president Fahim Uddin, was filed in Ingham County Circuit Court on Wednesday and represents a fairly novel approach that pursues the operators and owners of a facility for widespread care issues rather than individual worker incidents, Nessel said.
“Quite frankly, what we found was absolutely atrocious,” Nessel said.
The department studied Pioneer Health Care Managment’s staffing data and other reports from January 2020 through December 2025 to establish whether it had the staffing required for the number and medical acuity of patients in its care, Nessel said.
Across it’s nine facilities, she said, Pioneer was licensed for 508 beds but had, on average, 394 residents over the past five years. Based on the acuity needs of those residents, the Attorney General’s Office believed they failed to provide proper staffing 96% of the time, Nessel said.
Michigan law, Nessel said, requires one nursing staff person for every eight residents during the morning shift, one for every 12 residents on the afternoon shift and one for every 15 residents on the night shift.
“The defendants failed to meet these shift ratios on at least 496 (instances),” Nessel said.
The law also requires facilities to have enough staff to provide at least 2.25 hours of nursing care per resident each day, but the complaint alleges Pioneer fell below that threshold on 1,454 occasions.
The lack of staffing has real human costs, said Alison Hirschel, director of the Michigan Elder Justice Initiative, who was present during a press conference announcing the charges Thursday.
“Staffing is the crucial ingredient for both high quality care and life,” Hirschel said. “No matter how dedicated nursing home staff may be, they cannot safeguard residents or provide an enriching and dignified environment if they have too many residents to care for.”
The investigation, led by the Department of Attorney General’s Health Care Fraud Division, found understaffing at nine of Uddin’s facilities, according to the attorney general: Ashley Healthcare Center and Riverside Healthcare Center in Gratiot County; Heritage Manor Nursing & Rehab Center, Northville Manor, and Pine Creek Manor Skilled Nursing & Rehab Center in Wayne County; Lakeside Manor Nursing & Rehabilitation Center and Regency Manor Nursing & Rehabilitation Center in Macomb County; and Oakland Manor and Oakridge Manor Nursing & Rehab Center in Oakland County.
Nessel said the civil discovery process will delve into staffing levels as well as “related party transactions” to determine if Medicaid reimbursements were spent on patient care or kept as profit.
David Tanay, division chief for the department’s Health Care Fraud Division, said the department has successfully prosecuted individual nursing home caregivers over the years where there have been adverse events or patient injuries.
But the civil case brought under a failure of care allegation Thursday allows for a broader approach, Tanay said.
“Looking critically at that over the years,” Tanay said of individual prosecutions, “that has been an effective tool to address discrete incidents but not an effective tool to effect change within ownership and management of nursing homes.
“The case represents an attempt that is novel for Michigan, to go it alone on the theory, to try and hold ownership and management accountable for staffing conditions in the facilities,” he said.
eleblanc@detroitnews.com
This article originally appeared on The Detroit News: Nessel sues Michigan nursing home operator over low staffing levels
Reporting by Beth LeBlanc, The Detroit News / The Detroit News
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
By Beth LeBlanc, The Detroit News | USA TODAY Network
