Charge Mentally Ill Put Under Knife In Scheme To Bilk Medicaid

In its Dec. 17, 1998 investigative report on deficient physicians in Queens, The Queens Courier revealed that Dr. Peress was fined $10,000 in an unrelated case for poor record keeping. He has since retired but had indicated he would seek restoration of his license.
Peress, once one of the busiest urologists in Queens, often boasted to patients how many surgical cases he performed in one morning.
A former patient who asked to remain anonymous said that he told him, "Youre the 16th case this morning and I still have two more to go."
The patient said he told him, "You know, youve become a better person since you met me."
Peress scoffed at the Health Department charges and said, "Although I had arranged the surgeries, it was not my responsibility to assure that the patients gave proper consent."
"I am not a culprit," he said. I am a hero for treating these patients. I am being demonized after trying to help a group of poor souls."
Peress reportedly approached the Leben Home to care for the urological needs of its residents. At the time, he was part owner of Parkway and owned eight percent of the proprietary hospital. Parkway was soliciting business from the home during this period, according to investigators from the State Department of Health.
In an interview with The Courier, Dr. Frank Mazzagatti, senior vice president for administration, heaped the blame for any failures in obtaining informed consent from the mentally ill patients on the two doctors.
"That rests in most part on the physicians," he said.
The Parkway executive said that his Hospital has relationships with approximately 20 nursing homes and other facilities requiring health care services.
He said that Peress was formerly director of urology and had retired because "he was battling cancer, and Dr. Josifidis is an attending physician."
Josifidis was ordered by the State to give up his surgical practice and limit his professional activities to non-surgical care of patients.
The Leben Home was fined $5,000 for not supervising patients. Its attorney, Jay Breakstone, said "it was not the homes role to ensure that doctors or a hospital obtain proper consent for surgeries."
Breakstone told The Queens Courier that "apparently the surgeries performed by the Parkway urologists were unwarranted and the doctors took advantage of the residents of the Lebon Home."
He said that violations at the Home were corrected last summer.
Andrew Goldstein, a schizophrenic who was convicted of murder last year for pushing, Kendra Webdale, a former Queens Tribune reporter to her death in the subway, spent two years in the mid-1990s at Leben Home.
Health officials charged that Parkway used "assembly-line techniques to mass-produce surgery." The investigation grew out of a civil suit filed by the Leben Home residents who underwent surgery.