With the feds joining the parade calling out fraud in Gov. Kathy Hochul’s rancid home-care-aide “reform,” maybe the fundamental corruption of New York’s Medicaid programs will start to unravel.
The Justice Department’s Civil Division last week filed suit over the 2024 scheme to consolidate payrolls for nearly 240,000 home care aides covered by the $11 billion Consumer Directed Personal Assistance Program.
That makes a half-dozen lawsuits so far: It’s a parade!
Under CDPAP, Medicaid covers aides to help out elderly or disabled folks around the house, paying roughly $20 an hour.
New York lawmakers loosened the rules in 2015 so friends or relatives could get paid to do the work — whereupon costs rose by the billions as enrollment doubled.
The number of “middlemen” (businesses and nonprofits) that handle CDPAP payrolls shot up from seven to 700 — as scams skyrocketed, too.
Easy enough: The middleman pays for hours not worked, and splits the windfall.
At this point, monster health-worker union 1199 SEIU (eager to enroll new members) got Hochul to push a reform that would supposedly rein in costs.
No, not tightening the rules that started the cost explosion, but hiring a single company to handle all the payroll work.
That “fix” looks like a giant fraud.
The feds finger Health Commissioner James McDonald and Medicaid Director Amir Bassiri as rigging the bidding to award the payroll contract to Public Partnership LLC — and the move definitely reeks.
Multiple investigations have already proved that PPL was consulting with top state officials long before the official bidding opened; the company’s name even appeared in an early draft of the “reform” law.
Evidence in another lawsuit suggests 1199 was in on the rigging, too.
Awkwardly, PPL had already failed catastrophically and publicly in Pennsylvania and New Jersey before Team Hochul hired it — and did it again in New York, failing miserably at moving workers onto the centralized system.
But the transition was a huge winner for 1199, letting its New York membership grow nearly 50% as it began pushing boost CDPAP wages.
Surprise: Hochul’s reform hasn’t produced the $500 million a year in savings she promised, and will likely boost outlays as 1199 works its lobbying magic.
All of this is basically par for the course for Medicaid in New York, whose political machines rely on the interests that feed off the program.
That’s why overall spending spikes year after year; it’ll burn $124 billion this year — vastly more per capita than any other state and nearly triple the $46 billion outlays in 2013.
Even as 3 million of the state’s 6.4 million enrollees may not actually qualify for benefits.
Meanwhile, anti-fraud enforcement has sunk under Attorney General Letitia James, with investigations dropping 45% since she took office and fraud recoveries falling 80%.
Hochul, James and New York’s entire Democratic establishment erupt in fury whenever Washington looks to rein in its own hemorrhaging Medicaid outlays.
They always claim to be protecting the poor, but what they’re really guarding is the corruption that feeds their own careers in politics.