Talk about a racket! And one sponsored by the state, no less.
Albany is actually handing out billions to people claiming to be in-home “personal care” aides with little training and practically no oversight.
And — surprise, surprise — people are racing to milk the system for all they can get. They’re getting paid to care for their own parents.
The abuse began ramping up in 2016, when the state expanded its Medicaid program for “personal aides” — those who provide non-medical care to an elderly or disabled person who remains in his or her home, earning up to $21 an hour from the state.
The expansion allowed family or friends — nearly anyone, really — to qualify as an aide with little to no special training and no background checks required.
Indeed, Albany actually advertises the program as a way for young New Yorkers to stay home and get paid.
What could go wrong?
Sure enough, spending on personal care surged 178% from 2015 to 2021 —10 times faster than the growth of its elderly population — topping $12 billion a year, or “almost as much as the other 49 states’ spending combined,” the Empire Center’s Bill Hammond reports.
The number of home health aides in New York soared from about 250,000 to almost 480,000, as of 2022, over the previous decade.
To be sure, the program’s rationale — keeping those who need help at home instead of moving them to a facility, for their benefit and to save costs — makes sense.
Yet loose eligibility requirements have fueled skyrocketing growth, yet demand for nursing-home beds hasn’t fallen proportionally, a sure sign of fraud and abuse.
What did Albany expect? The program provides little supervision, so who know what these “aides” are doing during billed hours?
In 2020, federal prosecutors nabbed 10 people for home-health-aide fraud, including one said to have billed for time she spent on a Caribbean cruise.
Then again, all of this is typical where progressives offer insanely generous and poorly policed welfare and health-care benefits compared to even other blue states.
New York’s per-capita spending for personal-care alone, Hammond reports, is eight times higher than the national average.
Meanwhile, Albany will face a monster $15 billion budget gap in three years, per the Citizens Budget Commission, despite its nation-high taxes.
What will it take to put an end to such abuse and stem the fiscal bleeding?
This story originally appeared on NYPost
