--- title: "He Bought the Nursing Homes, Cut the Nursing, and Charged Them Rent" description: "A Boston Globe investigation finds RegalCare’s rapid rise in Massachusetts came with squalor, lies — and a regulator that never says no" author: "Arthur Wren" published: 2026-09-28T12:38:59.232Z modified: 2026-09-28T13:20:46Z url: https://rews.cc/a/he-bought-the-nursing-homes-cut-the-nursing-and-charged-them-a5b37f language: en tags: ["health", "nursing-homes", "regulation", "elderly", "fraud", "us"] publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)" --- # He Bought the Nursing Homes, Cut the Nursing, and Charged Them Rent *A Boston Globe investigation finds RegalCare’s rapid rise in Massachusetts came with squalor, lies — and a regulator that never says no* By Arthur Wren · September 28, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/he-bought-the-nursing-homes-cut-the-nursing-and-charged-them-a5b37f ## In brief - A Boston Globe Spotlight probe found RegalCare owner Eli Mirlis cut nursing hours nearly in half at a Taunton home that fell from five stars to one - RegalCare spent about $530,000 less on nursing at Taunton while Mirlis’s real estate firm raised the home’s rent to $522,000, four times the prior bill - New Jersey revoked Mirlis’s administrator license in 2018 for lying; he has since denied any revocation on at least seven Massachusetts applications - A resident’s death certificate cites serotonin syndrome after Holyoke staff doubled her antidepressants; her daughters are suing - The Massachusetts DPH has not denied a nursing home purchase or revoked a license in at least seven years, as nine outside chains grew from 12 homes to 61 The nursing home in Taunton, Massachusetts, was the kind of place the industry is supposed to produce and rarely does. The floors were scrubbed daily, the laundry came back folded, the staff stayed for decades. In early 2020 the 100-bed home won the federal government’s top quality rating, five stars, and kept it for more than two years. Then Eli Mirlis bought it, and within three years the rating was one star, the lowest there is. Mirlis, 38, came from New Jersey. In the past five years his company, RegalCare, has become one of the largest nursing home operators in Massachusetts, holding 12 homes in the state and at least 29 across five states, according to a Boston Globe Spotlight Team investigation published Sunday. Each year the company is answerable for thousands of residents in Massachusetts alone. The Globe found that Mirlis paid for this growth by cutting what nursing homes exist to provide. At Taunton, records show, he cut the hours of nursing staff by nearly half. By 2025 RegalCare was spending about $530,000 less on nursing services there than the previous owners had. That same year a real estate company Mirlis also owns billed the home $522,000 in rent, more than four times what the rent had been before he took over. The care money went down; the rent money went up, and both flows ended in the same man’s hands. RegalCare’s corporate motto tells residents they will ‘Rehab like Royalty.’ What inspectors and families describe is less regal. Call buttons went unanswered. Residents sat in soiled diapers for hours. A transplant patient at Taunton was never given 40 doses of medicine meant to prevent organ rejection, according to federal records; the hospital nurse who spotted the failure spent two weeks trying to reach anyone at RegalCare. Then there is the question of who Mirlis is. Online biographies have listed universities he did not attend and, on LinkedIn, licenses he no longer holds. In 2018 New Jersey regulators found he had lied about completing continuing-education requirements and permanently revoked his nursing home administrator’s license. Since 2020, on at least seven Massachusetts applications, he has checked a box stating he had never had a professional license revoked. The box was not true. Mirlis declined the Globe’s repeated interview requests. ‘I am not going to talk to you,’ he told a reporter by phone this summer. ‘You’ll make RegalCare look bad.’ Last week he emailed that ‘RegalCare is not “private equity” backed,’ and wrote that the company strives ‘for the highest level of care for every single patient and an excellent experience for families,’ working ‘closely with the Department of Public Health and others’ to correct any problems. In court several years ago he estimated his own net worth at $47 million. A Globe analysis of years of inspection records shows problems arise regularly at his homes. A Quincy facility, five stars when Mirlis bought it, has fallen to one; there in 2023 a blind, wheelchair-bound patient went down an unblocked ramp and suffered a brain hemorrhage and multiple fractures, according to a federal inspection report. Within a year of buying two Medford homes in 2024, RegalCare collected more than $400,000 in federal fines over the care of more than two dozen patients. A three-star Holyoke home bought in 2022 fell to one star by 2024 and has stayed there. It was the Holyoke home that sisters Tina and Theresa Walsh Jr. chose for their mother’s rehabilitation. For two weeks, staff gave Theresa Walsh Sr. two antidepressants where she had always received one; a RegalCare physician assistant wrote that she suspected a previous hospital had changed the prescription and the patient ‘ended up on both here.’ Walsh Sr. died at her daughter’s home seven weeks later. Her death certificate names serotonin syndrome. Her daughters are suing RegalCare and others, alleging the double dose of serotonin triggered a delirium their mother could not survive. > Aren’t these places regulated? Shouldn’t people be making them safe? Who’s dropping the ball here? That was Theresa Walsh Jr., and the Globe gives her question a straight answer: the Massachusetts Department of Public Health. The department has more than 3,200 employees, a $1.1 billion annual budget and charge of the state’s roughly 340 nursing homes. State law lets it refuse a sale when a buyer is not ‘responsible and suitable,’ and lets it revoke licenses it has granted. It has not refused a single purchase application, nor revoked a license, in at least seven years. Into that open door have walked RegalCare and eight other chains from New York and New Jersey. In 2019 the nine companies owned 12 Massachusetts facilities; they now control 61, nearly one in five in the state. Eight of the nine have seen their Massachusetts quality ratings fall since they arrived. The ninth ran below-average homes to begin with and has not improved them. Some owners told the Globe their homes are getting better and future ratings will rise. Mirlis’s paper trail was visible before the state waved him through again. When he applied to buy the two Medford homes in 2024, his own filing showed a majority of the nine Massachusetts homes he then owned ranked among the bottom 12 percent of facilities in the state. Two ranked in the bottom 1 percent. The department approved the purchase anyway, and in the past five months it has approved three more. Shown the Globe’s findings, Health Commissioner Dr. Robbie Goldstein said he knew of RegalCare’s record. ‘We owe the families who trust us and who are putting their loved ones into these facilities,’ he said. ‘We have to do better to maintain the quality and safety standards.’ He did not say how that record figured in the approvals, only that the agency weighs many variables, including community need. Joe Chaves ran maintenance and housekeeping in Taunton for 29 years, three of them under RegalCare. ‘We all worked very hard to get that building to a five-star,’ he said. ‘They came in, and it went out the window.’ In the past five months, while that window stayed open, the state let the company buy three more homes.