Mineola, New York — A nursing home resident’s oxygen tank ran empty. She begged a nearby nurse for air. The nurse decided she was exaggerating — a panic attack, she was told — and ordered Xanax. A supervisor caught the empty tank moments later and replaced it. The resident survived. The facility paid a $154,000 federal fine, the largest single penalty issued to a Long Island nursing home in 2025.
That case is among 18 citations issued to Long Island nursing homes last year for serious health and safety violations — including multiple allegations of physical and sexual abuse — that generated a combined $511,092 in state and federal fines, according to government records reviewed by regional media.
The figure covers nine facilities penalized by the New York State Health Department for a total of $116,000, along with six facilities separately fined by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services for a combined $395,092.
A Declining Trend — but Not a Reassuring One
At first glance, the numbers suggest improvement. The state fined just nine Long Island nursing homes in 2025 — the lowest count since 2018, when only four were penalized. Federal fines dropped more than 28% year-over-year, falling from $553,210 across 12 facilities in 2024 to $395,092 across six in 2025.
But elder care advocates aren’t celebrating. Richard Mollot, executive director of the Long Term Care Community Coalition, described the cited incidents as “horrifying” and said they represent a fundamental failure of care.
“The failures to address and report allegations of physical and sexual abuse signifies a number of serious failures, including failing to protect residents from harm, failure to support resident dignity, and failure to comply with legal and regulatory requirements for reporting both abuse and suspicion of a crime against a nursing home resident,” Mollot said.
A Death That Could Have Been Prevente
The most chilling case involved a resident at Water’s Edge Rehab and Nursing Center at Port Jefferson. On the evening of January 26, 2025, a nurse determined the resident — running a high fever and experiencing a rapid heart arrhythmia — needed an emergency blood transfusion. The nurse’s supervisor overruled the decision and said the hospital trip could wait until morning. By 2 a.m., the resident was dead. The state fined the facility $10,000 for the incident.
More than seven months later, the same facility received a separate $154,000 federal fine over the oxygen tank incident.
New York Lags Behind National Fine Averages
Nationally, nursing homes have averaged $32,637 in federal fines per facility over the past three years. New York facilities averaged $22,640 during that same period — ranking the state 30th nationwide. In 2025, 34% of New York nursing homes were fined at least once, compared with 53% nationally.
John Dalli, an elder care attorney based in Mineola, said the state’s enforcement record falls short of what families deserve. He said the state Health Department routinely closes investigations into resident falls and deaths after a single phone call to facility supervisors — without deeper inquiry.
By law, the state cannot fine a nursing home more than $10,000 for a single violation, though multiple citations can be stacked. That cap, critics argue, doesn’t create enough financial pressure on facilities to clean up systemic problems. It’s a dynamic similar to what regulators found when ordering the closure of a Connecticut facility after an Alzheimer’s patient wandered out and died — where fines alone failed to drive accountability until the state moved to shut the facility down entirely.
The New York State Department of Health said year-over-year trends in fine counts have “limited importance” and that lower numbers can reflect corrections that were successfully made and sustained from prior years. The department said it remains committed to holding operators accountable.
For the families of Long Island’s 78 largely private nursing home residents, that commitment is the only thing standing between their loved ones and the next incident that gets filed as a statistic.
