‘They Were Traumatized’: How a Private Equity-Associated Lender Helped Precipitate a Nursing-Home Implosion

The day Charlie Kukuczka's 94-year-old mother, Agnes, was abruptly uprooted from the Atrium Health and Senior Living facility outside Weston, Wisconsin, nobody from the nursing home contacted his family.

"A lot of people were shoved around like old shoes," recalled Kukuczka. "They were traumatized. They didn't tell them where they were going. They just woke them up and said, 'You're moving.'"

The episode was “heart-breaking,” said Barb Plautz, a beautician at the facility. Some of the residents, she said, “didn't have jackets. It was cold outside. They were crying. They didn't know why they were being kicked out.”

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services later declared in a report that the disorderly relocation put residents in “immediate jeopardy.”

When Atrium Health and Senior Living in the Midwest teetered in September 2018, triggering the sudden closure of the Weston home and three others several months later, the chaos capped years of mismanagement, with Atrium's owners enriched at the expense of vulnerable residents.

From 2015 until just a month before the near-collapse, Atrium’s owners allegedly paid themselves more than $37 million, according to a federal grand jury indictment in the western district of Wisconsin against CEO Kevin Breslin and Atrium for Medicare and Medicaid fraud. That came after Atrium had borrowed money from a company called MidCap Financial, an affiliate of private equity giant Apollo Global Management which is headed by Marc Rowan. The MidCap money allowed Atrium to expand its nursing home empire from the Northeast to the Midwest. The loan also enabled Atrium’s owners to take money out of their business, even as bills for essentials went unpaid, putting Atrium on the path to ruin.

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