The state has agreed to delay the deadline for its troubled home care overhaul until June, aiming to quell fears that caregivers wouldn’t receive paychecks on time under a new payment system.
Attorneys for the state and home care users proposed an agreement on Wednesday night that delays the state’s deadline to overhaul the consumer-directed personal assistance program, also known as CDPAP, until June 6. The state aimed to transition roughly 280,000 home care users and their caregivers to a new payment system by April 1, but slow enrollment and technical challenges that threatened to disrupt access to care have forced state officials to concede to a later date.
The proposed preliminary injunction, which is set to be decided by a federal judge Thursday, is the latest hurdle for the state’s contentious transition, which was spearheaded by Gov. Kathy Hochul last year to cut Medicaid costs. The Hochul administration contracted with a single payroll processing company, Georgia-based Public Partnerships LLC, or PPL, to pay caregivers through the program, replacing the roughly 600 third-party businesses that previously held that job. Since January, health officials have scrambled to enroll all home care users and workers with the new company, but efforts have stalled amid industry pushback, staffing challenges and court orders that have postponed the state’s deadline to complete the task.
Under the new agreement, home care users will have until May 15 to enroll in the new system and workers will have until June 6, according to the proposal. Consumers who themselves have not fully moved over to the new system or whose caregivers have had trouble signing up can use their old company to process worker payments in the meantime, but must continue registering with PPL by the new deadline, the proposed order says. PPL will offer an expedited registration process for those who cannot be paid through the old system.
“This proposed agreement supports the state’s ongoing CDPAP transition and ensures our reforms will proceed in full,” said Sam Spokony, a spokesman for the governor’s office, adding that the proposal will have no impact on the consumers and workers who have already completed their registration with PPL.
Spokony criticized misinformation about the transition. “The $10 million dark money campaign by shady business groups has failed to stop New York state’s much-needed CDPAP reforms, which will protect CDPAP for people who need it and put an end to runaway bureaucratic spending in this taxpayer-funded program,” he said.
As the state prepared to move all home care users and workers to PPL’s payment platform by April 1, many raised concerns that the company was ill-prepared to enroll people and process payments by the deadline. The state extended its registration period for 30 days and offered to pay workers retroactively for services rendered, but the move led to confusion and fears that people would lose services.
Days before the transition was supposed to come to a close, the New York Legal Assistance Group filed a lawsuit on behalf of home care consumers and businesses alleging major technical challenges that barred people from signing up with the new system and potentially disrupted care. The lawsuit led Judge Frederic Block, who presides over a federal court in Brooklyn, to issue a temporary restraining order last week, allowing the third-party businesses that used to pay personal assistants to continue serving home care users who had yet to enroll in the new system. The completion of the overhaul remained in limbo for days as attorneys for the state and home care users negotiated a deal to preserve access to care. Block is set to decide on the proposed agreement to delay the deadline on Thursday.
Advocates for home care users and the industry say the agreed-upon delay points to failures in the state’s transition plan.
“The Department of Health is fully admitting that PPL is not up to the job and that thousands of consumers are facing disruption of care,” said Bryan O’Malley, executive director of the lobbying group Alliance to Protect Home Care. “Considering PPL has screwed this up since the beginning, what makes anyone believe this will be any different with another two months?”
