A federal judge ordered Gov. Kathy Hochul’s administration to postpone its overhaul of a popular Medicaid-funded home care program until Friday, pushing the state past its April 1 deadline.
Hochul has pushed to consolidate the consumer directed personal assistance program – which allows elderly New Yorkers and people with disabilities to hire family members as caregivers – by the legally mandated deadline of April 1. The state tapped a single payroll processing company, Georgia-based Public Partnerships LLC or PPL, to pay all home care workers by that date, banning the roughly 600 third-party businesses that previously contracted with the state from doing that job.
The ruling puts that plan on ice for a few days. Judge Frederic Block, who presides over a federal court in Brooklyn, issued a temporary restraining order Monday that allows fiscal intermediaries to continue paying home care workers who have not registered with PPL – mitigating fears among home care users that they would lose services and reassuring workers that they could continue to get paid by April 1, even if they hadn’t signed up with the new system.
The order does not undo aspects of the transition that the state has already completed. PPL is allowed to operate and pay workers who have already registered on its platform, according to the judge.
“This temporary order is limited in scope and does not stop the state’s ongoing CDPAP transition,” Sam Spokony, a spokesman for the governor, said in a statement, urging consumers and workers to continue registering with PPL. “Hundreds of thousands of consumers and workers have already taken action as part of this transition, which will strengthen CDPAP for home care users who need it and protect all New York taxpayers by putting an end to years of runaway administrative costs,” Spokony said.
Home care users and personal assistants filed a lawsuit against the Department of Health last week, alleging that they have been unable to register with PPL because of long wait times, technical challenges and language access issues. The challenges made it impossible for them to enroll in the new system by the state’s April 1 deadline, putting their access to home care services at risk, according to the complaint, which was filed on behalf of the home care users by New York Legal Assistance Group.
The Department of Health, which is overseeing the home care overhaul, has been pushing the 280,000 people who use the consumer directed program and their personal assistants to sign up on PPL’s platform before the deadline. But challenges have led the state to acknowledge that it needed more time; officials last week announced a “late registration window” that gave home care users and workers until April 30 to sign up. The state promised to pay workers retroactively for services rendered, but advocates raised concerns that those aides, many of whom are low-income, could not go without a few weeks’ pay and may have to leave their caregiver jobs in search of other work.
The court will hold an additional hearing on Friday, where lawyers for the home care users plan to argue for a longer delay to ensure all individuals can safely transition to the new system.
The temporary restraining order comes on the same day that the U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor tossed out an emergency application from fiscal intermediaries aiming to block the state’s home care transition.
