970x125
Last October, President Donald Trump nominated nursing home owner Benjamin Landa as his next ambassador to Hungary, a key position that would place him in a country with a vigorous conservative movement. Trump has endorsed the country’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, a long-standing ally, for reelection, saying he “does an unbelievable job.”
970x125
One month after Landa’s appointment, the inspector general of Trump’s Department of Health and Human Services issued a blunt audit estimating that a nursing home Landa co-owns received Medicare overpayments of at least $31.2 million and recommending that the government recoup the money.
Now that facility, Pinnacle Multicare Nursing and Rehabilitation Center, is suing the very administration that is nominating Landa to the diplomatic post. The suit, filed Feb. 26 in federal district court in New York, asks the court to stop the government’s collection efforts and names HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Mehmet Oz, HHS Inspector General Thomas March Bell and a Medicare contractor as defendants. A federal district judge denied Pinnacle’s request for a temporary restraining order.
As of March, Landa has an ownership interest in more than 100 nursing homes in eight states, CMS data shows. Landa also is a donor to Republican causes, but his biggest donation by far was $5 million to MAGA Inc., a pro-Trump Super PAC, in August 2025, two months before his nomination.
Critics of Landa’s track record point to the audit’s findings, along with other legal actions against homes connected to him, as reasons that his nomination should face additional scrutiny.
Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat and ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee, which oversees Medicare and Medicaid, described Landa as an example of “giant corporate health care interests that prey on the vulnerable and use clever tricks to exploit loopholes at taxpayers’ expense.”
“It’s no surprise that these companies and their owners are cozy with Trump: instead of accountability, they’ve been rewarded,” Wyden said in a statement, with “plum political appointments and ambassadorships in Europe.”
The White House and the Department of State did not respond to requests for comment about the status of Landa’s nomination. An attorney for Landa denied wrongdoing in a statement, saying the issues identified in the audit occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic when nursing homes were in the midst of a crisis.
“At Pinnacle MultiCare, patient care comes first — period, full stop,” attorney Alyssa Friedman wrote in an email to ProPublica. “That commitment drove every decision during the pandemic and continues to define operations today.
“Let’s be clear: this is about decisive actions taken during the height of COVID-19 that prioritized patients and saved lives in one of the pandemic’s epicenters — decisions now being second-guessed years later through an absurdly flawed audit of billing paperwork and a retroactive reinterpretation of the rules by government bureaucrats,” she added.
The inspector general’s audit and the resulting lawsuit are the latest controversy involving Landa.
In November 2022, New York Attorney General Letitia James sued The Villages at Orleans Health and Rehabilitation Center, as well as Landa and others she said were owners of the facility. A press release announcing the suit alleged “years of financial fraud that resulted in significant resident neglect and harm.” Between 2015 and 2022, Landa made at least $1.49 million from the facility, James’ suit alleged, through means that James characterized as “looting.” Meanwhile, Landa “contributed nothing and failed to prevent the abuse and neglect,” the suit alleged. James described a pattern of harm to residents at the home, due in part to what the suit said was “systemic understaffing and cost cutting,” which included potentially preventable deaths of residents due to delayed wound care and suicide.
The home and the defendants named as owners have disputed the suit. In 2024, a state Supreme Court judge allowed multiple claims in the case to proceed; in 2025, Landa appealed that decision. The case is ongoing.
Landa’s attorney said her client “merely owned a minority interest in the company that owned the real estate and served as the landlord of the building out of which the facility operated. He had no interest in the licensed operator of the facility and no involvement in the operations of the facility. The attorney general’s claims against Mr. Landa are baseless and a waste of the court’s time and taxpayer dollars.”
One month after filing the suit against The Villages, James sued Cold Spring Hills Center for Nursing and Rehabilitation, based in Long Island, making nearly identical claims to her prior suit. Landa owned 25% of the facility’s property holding company, according to the lawsuit. Over a number of years, the facility paid over $15 million in rent to the property holding company co-owned by Landa; over $1.4 million to a management company co-owned by Landa; and almost $500,000 in consulting fees to a company owned by Landa, the lawsuit alleged. At the same time, residents were losing significant weight and developing malnutrition, enduring life-threatening pressure ulcers and repeatedly suffering unwitnessed falls, in part due to understaffing, James alleged.
The home and its owners disputed the allegations. In March 2024, a judge in Long Island ordered four defendants, including Landa, to pay a total of $2 million back to the nursing home, and ordered that an independent health care monitor be appointed to run the facility. Landa and his co-defendants have appealed various orders in the case. In January 2025, Cold Spring Hills filed for bankruptcy; in March 2025, the facility sold itself for $10 to a third-party receiver and changed its name. (“Our facility is now under new ownership with a renewed vision for excellence,” the nursing home’s rebranded website reads. “A new chapter in compassionate care has begun.”) The appeals and bankruptcy proceedings are ongoing.
Landa’s attorney said he was merely a landlord of Cold Spring Hills and was not involved in operating the facility. She noted that the judge found no fraud committed by Landa, that all business arrangements between Landa and the home were approved by the state health department, and that none of the defendants enriched themselves at the expense of patient care.
Landa has been involved with other legal actions related to his nursing homes. In 2017, for example, an employment agency co-owned by Landa was sued on behalf of a class of Filipino nurses alleging that it had trafficked them, withheld wages, and threatened civil and criminal litigation should the nurses leave. In September 2019, a New York district court found the agency and its owners had violated the Trafficking Victims Protection Act; in April 2022, the case was settled for $3 million on the condition that the findings involving trafficking were vacated. Landa’s attorney did not respond to follow-up questions about the other suits in which he has been involved.
In one of her 2022 lawsuits, James estimated Landa’s net worth at more than $300 million in 2016.
The audit at the center of the current lawsuit was the government’s first related to a new nursing home payment system rolled out during Trump’s first term. Under the previous system, nursing homes were reimbursed based on the number of minutes of therapy provided to patients, which “created financial incentives” for them to focus on patients who needed therapy, according to the November audit report. In contrast, the new payment system was designed to “improve payment accuracy and appropriateness by focusing on the enrollee, rather than volume of services provided,” according to the report.
The inspector general’s office found that Pinnacle, located in the Bronx, received significantly higher reimbursements from Medicare under the new payment system than the old one, raising red flags at the agency.
The inspector general found that Pinnacle had violated CMS billing requirements in 99 of the 100 claims it audited. The agency noted that, in 95 of those 99 claims, Pinnacle requested reimbursement for levels of services that were higher than what was justifiable when the agency reviewed patients’ charts — for example, billing for speech therapy for aphasia in a patient who clinicians had explicitly stated did not need speech therapy. Additionally, in 54 of the 99 claims, the agency found, Pinnacle provided services that could not be justified by the patients’ charts — for example, billing for “bed mobility and wheelchair training” for patients who were able to walk on their own.
The HHS inspector general’s office declined to comment on the audit, citing pending litigation.
Separately, the New York State Department of Health has imposed three financial penalties against Pinnacle since 2021.
In its lawsuit, Pinnacle alleges that the auditors “blatantly ignore” state and federal waivers for documentation and billing requirements issued as part of the effort to reduce administrative barriers to patient care during the COVID-19 public health emergency. “Pinnacle’s efforts to provide exceptional care to its patients were an undeniable success,” the facility wrote in the lawsuit.
Additionally, the facility only had two COVID-19 deaths at the height of the pandemic — “one of the lowest COVID related death totals among New York nursing homes despite being a 480-bed facility located in one of the most heavily affected areas,” Landa’s attorney said. “The outcomes during that period are the most important measure of care,” she added.
In its suit, Pinnacle characterized the government’s demand for repayment as an “administrative process riddled with constitutional violations.” That request “would immediately paralyze Pinnacle by rendering it unable to pay its employees,” the facility added, “and would result in the shut down of the entire nursing facility — leaving highly vulnerable patients without life-saving care, depriving hundreds of individuals of jobs and income, and divesting New York City of this critical medical facility.”
Industry watchdogs say threatening closure in response to state or federal enforcement actions is a familiar ploy for nursing home owners.
“That’s their constant refrain whenever they don’t get what they want,” said Kevin Walsh, former New Jersey comptroller who investigated tens of millions of dollars in nursing home fraud during his tenure.
“The risk of closure based on the finances and cost reports that I’ve seen seems low,” Walsh added. “They’re not going to kill the golden goose they’re using to siphon profits.”
Landa has repeatedly filed lawsuits in response to allegations against nursing homes with which he is affiliated. In 2022, he brought a suit for libel against The American Prospect, as well as one of its reporters and an editor, following an investigation titled “The Nursing Home Slumlord Manifesto.” Years earlier, he sued freelancers writing for ProPublica, also alleging defamation. Judges dismissed both cases.
Landa’s nomination remains under consideration by the Senate Foreign Relations committee. (No hearing has been scheduled.) But if confirmed as ambassador to Hungary, Landa would hold a powerful position.
Hungary, despite its small population and historically minor role in U.S. foreign policy, holds increasing symbolic importance in the global conservative movement.
In a mid-February visit to Budapest, Trump administration officials reinforced their support for Orban. Secretary of State Marco Rubio signed an agreement to nurture Hungary’s civilian nuclear program. (The country does not presently have nuclear weapons, according to the World Nuclear Association, an international organization that publishes reports on global nuclear activity.)
“We are entering this golden era of relations between our countries,” Rubio said in a press conference in Budapest, “not simply because of the alignment of our people, but because of the relationship that you have with the president of the United States.”
970x125
