Rabbi Bernard Bergman, in refusing yesterday to reappear before a Senate subcommittee investigating nursing home operations in New York, challenged the legality of the committee to probe into his personal affairs. Bergman’s lawyer, Nathan Lewin of Washington, D.C., said Bergman was withdrawing his offer to cooperate with the subcommittee on long-term care because “this committee is not conducting an investigation in nursing homes but an inquisitory investigation into one man, Dr. Bergman.”
Sen. Frank E. Moss (D.Utah), the subcommittee’s chairman, who expressed surprise at Bergman’s failure to appear, said the subcommittee would seek a court order citing Bergman for “contempt of Congress.” Moss said the subpoena under which Bergman appeared Jan. 21 was still valid for yesterday.
Lewin challenged this and contended that Bergman had not been directed to attend yesterday and had only been requested. He challenged the legality of the subcommittee investigation and the subpoenas. He said Bergman had originally agreed to cooperate but was withdrawing this offer because, although the records of 41 nursing home operators had been subpoenaed, only Bergman was being questioned.
“We’re not after Dr. Bergman,” Moss said. “We’re not after anyone.” He said the subcommittee was only trying to find the truth out about nursing home operations in order to propose legislation to improve nursing home operations. But he said if the subcommittee found violations of law it would turn them over to the Department of Justice. Both Moss and Sen. Charles H. Percy (R.III.) said the subcommittee’s practice in its hearings in New York and other cities was to zero in on one or two operations since it could not take testimony on every nursing home.
RIGHT TO KNOW HOW MONEY IS SPENT
The members of the committee took umbrage against Lewin’s attacks on their operations. Percy said that in his nine years in the Senate “I have never heard any witness at any time make the kind of allegations that you have made against the motives, intentions, objectives of members of the United States Senate who are serving in this capacity.” He said Bergman was receiving Medicaid funds for his nursing homes and the committee had a right to know how they were handled because “he is spending our money…your money…the public’s money,” Sen. Pete V. Domenici(R.N.M.) said Lewin could make any type of procedural challenges in court but could not tell the committee how it should do its work.
Lewin had earlier challenged a subpoena asking the American Bank and Trust Co., to present Bergman’s bank records saying it was an invasion into Bergman’s privacy. Bergman’s accountant, Samuel A. Dachowitz, refused to testify before the committee citing the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination. Dachowitz, like Bergman, has been subpoenaed before the United States Attorney in New York and state investigatory bodies.
Lewin yesterday charged that Bergman, who in a Jan. 21 appearance before the subcommittee denied any wrong doing, is a victim of a “deliberate, malicious vendetta” by New York City newspapers and the Temporary State Commission on Living Costs headed by Assemblyman Andrew Stein.
NURSING HOME SITUATION A NATIONAL SCANDAL
In a dramatic confrontation yesterday Stein said under oath that when he first began investigating nursing homes. Assemblyman Stanley Steingut, now Speaker of the Assembly, asked him not to look into the homes operated by Bergman, Steingut, who had originally called Stein a “liar,” testified under oath yesterday that he could not recall any such conversations with Stein. Steingut, noting that his Brooklyn Assembly District had a high concentration of Orthodox Jews, said he knew Bergman for 20 years because of Bergman’s position in the Orthodox community. Bergman is a leader of the American and world Mizrachi movement. Steingut denied having any business connections with Bergman and said he had never done him any political favors.
At the outset of the hearing Moss said the committee was trying to expose nursing home abuses such as the selling of the homes back and forth to increase reimbursement from Medicaid, paying of large salaries and rents to the operators, hiding the owner’s names, charging items to Medicaid which should not be charged, and using political influence. All of these things had been charged against Bergman’s operation.
Percy said the nursing home situation was a “national scandal” and the committee wanted to drive out of business operators who were more interested in profit than the needy sick. He said unless the industry polices itself, nursing homes would have to be taken out of the profit system and put into a non-profit system. Percy, who frequently visits nursing homes in Illinois, said he has seen good nursing homes, usually ones run by volunteer organizations. “Among the best nursing homes I have seen are those controlled by the Jewish community,” he said.
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