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Gov. Kathy Hochul’s big push to rein in an explosive Medicaid program is proving a giveaway — at taxpayers expense, ‘natch — to one of New York’s most insatiable unions, 1199 SEIU.
It’s technically not one of the public-sector unions that wield enormous political power in blue states, since 1199 members mainly work for private-sector hospitals, but the huge amount of government spending on health care (especially in New York) makes 1199 Service Employees International Union behaving much the same way.
And 1199 is about to grow its ranks massively thanks to a hare-brained 2024 “reform” Hochul pushed through in the name of fighting fraud in the Consumer Directed Personal Assistance Program, under the state pays family members of disabled Medicaid recipients to provide home care.
After we and others flagged how loose eligibility rules and other issues had led to a 1,200% spike in CDPAP enrollment, soaring fraud and outlays of $11 billion, the gov used public outrage to pass a reform she vowed would rein in the program.
Yet her “solution” was simply to hire a single company, Public Partnerships, to centralize payments to these aides — which now lets them legally count as PPL employees, and so qualified to unionize.
Or, more accurately, be targeted for unionization by 1199.
On Wednesday, the Empire Center’s Bill Hammond publicized a letter notifying “home health aides” they’ll soon be able “to decide whether to form a union and join 1199SEIU.”
“A campaign by 1199 SEIU to organize roughly a quarter-million home health aides,” Hammond warns, “has begun in earnest.”
The new members could swell the union’s already 450,000-strong rank and file by more than 50% — ballooning not just its membership rolls, but its political influence and dues revenue.
And with all that new power and money, this behemoth — which already spends millions on political campaigns each year — will have Albany even more at its beck and call.
When the union demands higher wages and better benefits for its members, lawmakers will jump and ask, How much?
And overwhelmingly at taxpayer expense.
Ditto for all the politically progressive issues the union backs that have nothing to do with health-care workers’ compensation.
The biggest obscenity, of course, is how Hochul’s effort to (supposedly) prevent fraud morphed into this massive gift to 1199.
On the one hand, federal investigators are probing alleged bid-rigging in the awarding of the single-payer contract to PPL.
On the other is how its selection was enough for these 250,000 home-care “workers” to be considered PPL employees — and so qualify for unionization.
Hochul claims that hiring PPL produced savings of as much as $2 billion, but the long-term cost is sure to prove far higher.
Enriching and handing even more power to 1199 will further weaken democracy in New York — and sock taxpayers’ pocketbooks hard, too.