State Health Dept. Defers Action on Troubled Agency The New York State Department of Health on Thursday abruptly withdrew its recommendation that a home health care agency with a checkered past be granted an expanded license, saying that new information had come to its attention and that officials needed more time to evaluate it before a vote on the license. That decision came hours after an article in The New York Times was published documenting a long history of Medicaid fraud investigations of the agency, Americare Certified Special Services, as well as pending lawsuits that detail patterns of patient mistreatment, forgery of medical documents and the sexual misconduct of a top executive on gambling trips at company expense. The agency has denied wrongdoing in all cases, but over the years, under the same ownership, it has paid millions of dollars in settlements, including $1.2 million to settle its part of a wider federal lawsuit over unnecessary prostate operations forced on mentally ill residents of an adult home. Asked about that record earlier this week, Health Department officials maintained that Americare's application had met all the criteria set by the administration of Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo as part of a sweeping Medicaid redesign, and that after a thorough review, no concerns or problems had been identified. But the state's view had changed by the time a committee of the Public Health and Health Planning Council gathered on Thursday morning in a crowded fourth-floor meeting room in a post office in Lower Manhattan. As members of the audience murmured in puzzlement, the committee simply skipped over Americare, which had been listed as the sixth item of 15 on a 315-page agenda. "It was deferred at the department's request," Charles Abel, the Health Department representative at the meeting, said later. Additional information has come to our attention, and we need time to assess it. Mr. Abel would not elaborate, but he said that the matter would not return to the committee for at least two months, when the next meeting cycle begins. Committee decisions go before the full council for final consideration. The deferral was cautiously welcomed by advocates at the New York Legal Assistance Group, which in 2011 sued Americare and several other home care agencies on behalf of bedridden seniors who were abruptly denied care. "I don't know if it's just smoke screen, if they're hoping that next time this doesn't get as much scrutiny, or if they're really going to reconsider," said Benjamin Taylor, a lawyer with the legal services group. What they should reconsider is whether they really want to reward a company like Americare that has such a long history of bad behavior. For years, those restrictions were unenforced by the state and ignored by the agencies that secured so-called special needs licenses, a sore point with critics like Susan Regan, a veteran member of the council who last May opposed a similar application by Excellent Home Care, another agency with a problematic record. Excellent's application, deferred last year, was back before the committee on Thursday. It was deferred again, this time until a special meeting on Feb. 13, the day the full council votes, after Ms. Regan, now retired from the council, showed up to object again as a member of the public. Ms. Regan said that the department had failed to answer the questions posed last year about the identity of all of Excellent's owners, the legality of some of its practices and an outstanding debt of $6.9 million to one of its vendors, Caring Professionals, which supplied home attendants. "The attempt to obtain the council's approval of this application is shameful," Ms. Regan said. If the regulators of health care facilities, including this council, are unable or unwilling to perform the basic duty of preventing known violators from holding valuable licenses, the public should question the reason for its existence.