A New Jersey-based medical group has presided over $950 million in shady Medicaid billing home health care and adult day care services, an investigation by The Post reveals.
One operation owned by Honor Health Network, the Broadway Respite and Home Care in Fair Lawn, NJ, has billed a staggering $157 million from Medicaid from 89,000 unique patients across a six-year period, according to federal spending data.
This despite the entire county only having roughly 20,000 elderly Medicaid recipients, according to data from Georgetown University.
“It doesn’t look right. It’s very weird,” a former Medicaid fraud investigator, who requested anonymity, told The Post after reviewing the numbers.
The home care industry gobbles up hundreds of billions of dollars a year in Medicaid funding, paying individuals to look after homebound, chronically-ill seniors. However, it is routinely scammed, according to federal authorities and previous Post investigations.
Two home care entities operated by Honor Health Network called Quality Healthcare and Quality Family Care in Brooklyn, NY, billed a staggering $396 million, according to government data for 2018 to 2024.
Homebound senior and former Quality Healthcare client Serena Abekassis, 80, claimed to The Post care workers from that agency were substandard.
“I’m very sick and I can’t get up. They didn’t change me or even take me to the toilet,” she recounted, in stories confirmed by two of her children. “They took my bra, dresses, my food.
“I don’t know where they picked these home care workers from. They were like homeless people from the street — incompetent and aggressive,” daughter Iris Abekassis told The Post.
Son Ralph Abekassis claimed he found a liquor bottle next to a sleeping aide one afternoon and that he reported the behaviors to police, but they did nothing.
“The people they were sending were very bad, low quality people who needed help themselves,” he said.
Quality Healthcare did not respond to a request for comment on these allegations.
Back in Fair Lawn, across the street from Broadway Respite is the affiliated Broadway Adult Day Care, which billed Medicaid $40 million between 2018 and 2024 for 28,000 unique patients, according to the data.
These entities only used one billing code each for the over two million individual claims processed during that time period—a pattern that could be consistent with fraud, cops previously told The Post, and a red flag for investigators.
A billing code describes what aides were doing at the time to help patients. Generic ones apply for things like “help at home with bathing, dressing and eating,” or “adult day care, billed per day” but day cares typically use multiple codes related to transportation, other medical services, memory care and others, according to industry sources.
Honor Health Network, Broadway Respite, Broadway Adult Day Care, Quality Healthcare and Quality Family Care have not been accused of wrongdoing. Their representatives did not answer multiple requests for comment from The Post.
The former fraud cop looked at the data for Broadway Respite and Adult Day Care and found the volume of patients reportedly checking into those facilities “very surprising,” and explained that in other cases he has worked unrelated to these facilities, there was widespread “double dipping,” with instances such as “one person could have two different names, [or] two different Medicaid beneficiary numbers.”
Fair Lawn sits in tony Bergen County, one of the wealthiest counties in New Jersey and the entire US.
The median household income in Fair Lawn is $144,000 a year—double that of Medicaid hot spots such as New York City neighborhoods like Flushing, Queens.
“If you think about it, it’s a suburb. Everyone has to have a car. These are middle or higher income households. The Medicaid rules state you have to be poor and old. [Almost] every one of these seniors would have to give up their assets to qualify,” the investigator added.
Bergen County-based Honor Health Network says on its website it was founded in 2013 and has over 10,000 employees, including at twenty agencies and multiple adult day care centers “servicing 15,000+ patients across eight states and DC”
Among the businesses they operate, about a dozen were identified as having suspicious billing patterns, totaling over $950 million in Medicaid cash over the six-year period from 2018 to 2024.
However, other centers in the Honor Health Network showed typical billing and patient numbers.
First Horizons Home Health Care in Indianapolis, Ind. billed $16.4 million—21 times higher than the Health and Human Services median for that area —for 5,600 patients, again all using one code.
Multiple families told The Post they have no clue how many hours care companies who look after them are charging to Medicaid, a lack of transparency which is industry-wide.
“We never see the billing. They could show up and sit in their car for an hour for all we know,” Fred Dennis, a 58-year-old bail bondsman whose aunt was in the care of First Horizons, told The Post.
“They’re supposed to come in and do little things, vacuum, mop, fix a meal, but they just sat there. One time [a home care worker] put a corn dog in the microwave, got on her phone and forgot about it for 55 minutes. The apartment was filled with smoke,” he recalled.
First Horizons also did not respond to a request for comment on these allegations and hasn’t been accused of wrongdoing.
On a recent visit to Broadway Adult Day Care in Fair Lawn The Post observed large crowds of healthy-looking, active seniors enjoying lunch and being ferried to and from the facility via white sprinter vans. Shirtless men with towels tied around their waists enjoyed cigarettes outside the Russian sauna next door.
Day care administrator Yuri Mitchell took the Post on a tour during a bustling afternoon lunch, where he said his clients are primarily Koreans and Russian Jews, approximating 300 people a day come through in two shifts. He confirmed the crowd is mostly the same people each day, with some variation.
“I don’t know about the numbers because I’m not dealing with the numbers,” Mitchell shrugged when asked about the 28,000 reported unique patients.
“We’re part of a corporation. All of our spending goes through a financial department,” he said, but said he could not provide more details.
Headquartered in a strip mall next door to Sexy Nails Spa and Sun Tan City, a woman who identified herself as the manager of Broadway Respite Home Care told The Post she had no knowledge of billing information, how many patients were in her agency’s care or company structure.
According to its website, Honor Health Network owns three other businesses in New Jersey: Always Home Services in Cherry Hill, Just Home Day Care in New Brunswick, and Best Home Care in Jersey City.
Those businesses raked in $31.7 million from 18,000 unique patients; $21.9 million across 15,000 patients and $123 million for 64,000 patients respectively over six years, according to the data.
“You have a lot of providers coming in and seeing this as a way to make a lot of money, as a cash cow. I think their motivation shifted to being financial rather than providing services,” Errol Seltzer, former owner of Broadway Respite and Broadway Adult Day Care, who sold the companies in 2012, told The Post.
Last month federal agents raided several adult daycare centers across Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island as part of an expansive Medicaid fraud crackdown. Investigators targeted more than 100 providers suspected of money laundering, kickbacks and improper billing.
Two operators face over 400 charges for stealing $530,000—including brazenly pocketing thousands by billing Medicaid for at least 32 clients who were either dead or out of the country.Those raids followed extensive reporting by The Post this summer about New York’s “Medicaid fraud capital” in Flushing, Queens, where nearly 80 adult day cares operate within a one mile radius, billing taxpayers over $100 million a year.
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