Gov. Hochul pushed back Friday on a major health union’s demand that she delay moving home care for more than 250,000 New Yorkers to a single administrator, a transition Hochul’s office says is necessary to head off “runaway costs.”
Just days before an April 1 deadline for hundreds of companies to stop managing the Consumer-Directed Personal Assistance Program (CDPAP) and for the firm Public Partnerships LLC to take over, the powerful health care union 1199SEIU urged that she pause the transition of several billions of dollars in Medicaid-funded home care to the management of one single entity.
The union, which represents roughly 10,000 CDPAP home care workers statewide, joins a wave of industry and consumer groups urging she slow or halt the switch.
Enrollment in the program, which lets elderly and disabled people choose their own paid caregivers, has swelled in recent years, costing the state over $12 billion last year. The state says changing from more than 700 companies, known as fiscal intermediaries, to a single administrator will save tens of millions of dollars and inhibit fraud.
But the union, which supports the idea of transitioning to a single administrator, says that more than 100,000 workers have yet to sign up with the new company — and urged the governor to sign an executive order allowing the fiscal intermediaries to continue in order to prevent delays in care and payroll.
“There must be immediate and urgent action to mitigate disruption for consumers and the workers who care for them before April 10th, when workers on a weekly payroll would expect to be paid for hours beginning after April 1st,” 1199SEIU president George Gresham said in a statement.
The union issued recommendations aimed at improving consumer outreach and ensuring Public Partnerships abides by state-mandated industry wage standards.
On Thursday, the state health department said approximately 150,000 consumers have already started or completed their registration with PPL.
In a statement, Hochul spokesperson Sam Spokony said the state will not budge on the deadline. “Hundreds of thousands of CDPAP consumers and workers have already taken action as part of the State’s transition, which remains on track for April 1,” he said. “The State has made this progress despite waves of misinformation spread by certain businesses trying to disrupt the transition to protect their own profits.”
Last year, Hochul called the fiscal intermediary system a “racket” and CDPAP “one of the most abused programs in the State of New York.”
Since first proposing the switchover as part of the $233 billion state budget last year, Hochul has been the target of lawsuits from fiscal intermediaries and consumer advocates seeking to stop the takeover. Some of the companies slated to lose their CDPAP business had joined forces with a rival union to Local 1199, Home Healthcare Workers of America, that has also advocated to halt the transition.
Public Partnerships, selected by the Hochul administration in October, has come under intense scrutiny.
New York Focus reported this week that its health insurance administrator was convicted of submitting falsified documents to Congress and spent years helping New York-based home care employers skirt state requirements to compensate home care workers above the minimum wage.
As the April 1 deadline looms, groups opposed to the CDPAP switchover entirely are turning up the heat on the Hochul administration, holding regular protests at the state Capitol to try and push her back to the drawing board.
NY Caring Majority, a coalition of groups long opposed to the switch, cheered 1199’s reversal, saying it was better late than never.
“It’s about time: after months of warnings from the Caring Majority, 1199SEIU has finally acknowledged what consumers and workers have known all along — the CDPAP transition plan is an unmitigated disaster poised to devastate the home care hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers rely on,” the group said in a statement Friday morning.
Some lawmakers have been more forceful.
“For the love of all that is holy and heaven and earth, delay the goddamn date,” state Sen. Gustavo Rivera (D-The Bronx), who chairs the chamber’s health committee, said at a rally Wednesday at the state Capitol.
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