Plea deal offered for former owner of NEA nursing homes

JONESBORO — The former owner of nursing homes in Newport, Jonesboro, Batesville, Searcy and several other Arkansas locations, has been offered a plea deal in a New Jersey federal court for willfully failing to pay employment taxes, according to court records.

Philip R. Sellinger, the U.S. attorney for the New Jersey District, formalized the offer in a memo dated Jan.

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Joseph Schwartz, 64, who ran more than 114 facilities out of a tiny office above a New Jersey pizza joint, was accused in a $38 million payroll tax fraud scheme.

“If Schwartz enters a guilty plea and is sentenced to 12 months and one day imprisonment, and 3 years’ supervised release on these charges, and fulfills a $5 million restitution payment due at the time of sentencing (the ‘Stipulated Sentence’), and otherwise fully complies with this agreement, this Office will not initiate any further criminal charges against Schwartz for withholding the necessary funding required to pay the trust fund taxes and unemployment taxes due and owing for employees of Skyline Management Group LLC and the related entities …” according to Sellinger’s memo.

The memo noted that a judge had the right to reject the agreement, and if Schwartz fails to agree to the guilty plea, prosecutors would seek stiffer penalties.

NBC News reported Saturday that Schwartz had pleaded guilty. However, electronic court records only show that the agreement had been offered.

Court documents show that Schwartz operated Skyline Healthcare using an intricate web of more than 190 limited liability companies, or LLCs, nationwide that oversaw facilities across 11 states, NBC reported.

The rapid rise and fall of the Skyline chain from 2017 to 2019 resulted in more than a dozen Skyline-operated nursing homes’ shutting down, throwing residents, vendors, employees and state regulators into chaos.

The broadcast network said the state of Arkansas issued Skyline facilities more than $200,000 in civil fines for neglect, preventable falls, failure to bathe residents and the presence of maggots in a resident’s personal med-

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ical equipment.

Former employees of the nursing home chain also filed suit in 2020 in New Jersey.

They claimed they were left without health insurance even though money had been deducted from their paychecks.

Employees only found out they did not have health insurance when they were billed for medical procedures, according to the lawsuit.

Margaret Gates, former activities director at the former Lindley Healthcare and Rehabilitation Center in Newport, is among the lead plaintiffs in that case. Gates said she was stuck with a $50,000 medical bill after she learned Skyline didn’t provide insurance coverage as promised, even after the company had deducted insurance premiums from her paychecks.

Records in that case show Schwartz and his companies never responded to the lawsuit, though a judgment against Schwartz has never been entered by a judge in the case. Attorneys have asked for almost $2.5 million in a proposed default judgment.

Schwartz also faces criminal charges in Pulaski County Circuit Court, where he is accused of overbilling the Arkansas Medicaid Program by more than $3.6 million, and withholding more than $2 million from employees’ paychecks in Arkansas.

Pretrial hearings on the Arkansas charge are scheduled for May 31 in Little Rock with a jury trial set for the week of July 22.

At one time, Skyline Healthcare owned nearly two dozen nursing homes in Arkansas.

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WIC use decreased during and after COVID-19

Researchers at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences in Little Rock found significant declines in WIC participation during and after the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a study published in the American Journal of Public Health.

The researchers – led by student- researcher and UAMS College of Medicine student Savannah Busch – measured changes in participation in the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC) among more than 10 million Medicaid-covered births across the United States between 2016 and 2022. During this time period, researchers found that participation in WIC went from 66.6 to 57%.

In addition to significant declines in WIC participation during and after the pandemic, researchers discovered even greater reductions in the program’s participation among individuals of minority race/ethnicity.

“WIC services have been consistently shown to improve infant outcomes at birth, as well as throughout infancy, while providing other maternal health benefits,” said researcher Dr. Clare Brown, an assistant professor in the UAMS Fay W. Boozman College of Public Health. “Anything that suggests reduced utilization of WIC for those who may need WIC services is a bad thing, and we found that the COVID-19 pandemic reduced the use of WIC services overall, and there were even larger reductions for individuals of minority races or ethnicities.”

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food and Nutrition Services, WIC provides “supplemental foods, health-care referrals and nutrition education for low-income pregnant, breastfeeding and non-breastfeeding postpartum women, and to infants and children up to age 5 who are found to be at a nutritional risk.”

To apply for WIC, women must visit a health professional to determine whether they are at a nutritional risk.

The availability of such processes and other eligibility screenings, Brown said, was greatly impacted during the pandemic, as many clinics and agencies had reduced or limited hours and many populations faced new transportation challenges, particularly in areas that more commonly use public transportation. Additionally, for individuals who speak limited or no English, or who work during daytime hours, applying for WIC can be even more challenging, she said.

“When we see that the use of WIC declines for a community who’s already at increased risk of bad infant and maternal health outcomes, those bad health outcomes might get even worse,” Brown said. “Many public health programs have strict eligibility requirements. Understanding what those requirements are and finding ways to create flexibilities in those requirements is really important, particularly for reducing health disparities.”

For the WIC program, those flexibilities could include increased hours of clinics and agencies that facilitate the WIC application process, providing non-English applications and resources, allowing various proofs of residency, increasing the number of stores that participate in the WIC program, and increasing WIC-eligible food products.

Brown added that Native Hawaiian and other Pacific Islander groups saw one of the greatest relative declines in WIC participation over the study’s six-year period. This is a critical finding for mothers in Arkansas – a state that was recently ranked worst in the nation for maternal mortality and given the state’s large population of Marshallese mothers.

$2.23M awarded for myeloma precursor study Researchers at UAMS recently received two awards totaling $2.23 million for UAMS’ continuing examination of therapies to treat multiple myeloma.

Myeloma Center research director Dr. Fenghuang (Frank) Zhan and Dr. John D. Shaughnessy Jr., professor of medicine, will lead projects funded by a $1.73 million National Institutes of Health U54 grant and a $500,000 Myeloma Solutions Fund award. The NIH U54 grant collaborates with the Baylor College of Medicine and Duke University. The Myeloma Solutions Fund award includes a collaboration between UAMS, the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center and the Houston Methodist Neal Cancer Center.

Zhan is the principal investigator for a project titled “Prevention of MGUS Progression to Multiple Myeloma by Modulating the Bone Marrow Microenvironment.” MGUS refers to monoclonal gammopathy of undetermined significance, a premalignant condition of antibody-producing plasma cells that can frequently progress to multiple myeloma or Waldenstrom’s macroglobulinemia.

“The long-term objective is to determine the functional role of the bone marrow microenvironment in the development of MGUS and its eventual progression to myeloma,” Zhan said. “The prevalence of MGUS increases with age, suggesting that risk factors associated with aging are important in MGUS development.”

Shaughnessy directs the Bioinformatics Core of the U54 project.

“Our goal is to provide indepth molecular analysis of malignant plasma cells and the cells of the bone microenvironment isolated from patients enrolled in clinical trials over the past 25 years at UAMS, with the aim of distinguishing targetable molecular events in MGUS that has progressed to multiple myeloma or Waldenstrom’s macroglobulinemia from MGUS that has remained stable for many years,” said Shaughnessy.