New York Governor Kathy Hochul slammed the state's Medicaid care program as a "racket" as more and more people are getting paid to care for their loved ones with Medicaid money.
"Oftentimes, ideas that start with the best of intentions can be taken advantage of in the wrong hands," Alex Beene, a financial literacy instructor at the University of Tennessee at Martin, told Newsweek.
"With home health, some states like New York thought it would be a good idea to allow family members and friends to get paid for providing home health assistance to loved ones using Medicaid and Medicare dollars. The problem is now you have individuals taking advantage of a pretty liberal, open-ended process for determining who qualifies."
Hochul told Bloomberg that the program was being abused so much that it now makes up the majority of New York City's job increases.
Medicaid funds the Consumer Directed Personal Assistance Program in the state, which is set up as a way to employ people to take care of their loved ones. While seen as a home health care provider, the program pays people to take care of their family and friends with Medicaid funds.
"I'm telling you right now, when you look on TikTok and you see ads of young people saying, 'Guess what, you can make $37 an hour by sitting home with your Grandma. You know, here's how you sign up,' it has become a racket," Hochul told Bloomberg.
She also said it was "one of the most abused programs in the entire history of the state of New York," and added, "Something has to give."
According to New York budget documents for April, the vast majority of the jobs added over the past year have been concentrated in the home health industry.
And several changes to the program over the years have made it easier for residents to get paid by Medicaid to care for their own family members.
In 2015, the eligibility rules changed, and the number of people getting care skyrocketed from 20,000 to 250,000. That also saw the money going to this program triple across the span of the last five years, and home health jobs are considered to make up 12 percent of New York City's private sector jobs, Bloomberg reported.
There are also union issues at play, and classifying New York residents as employees for taking care of their family members means they can be unionized for their work under Medicaid.
Beene said while the Consumer Directed Personal Assistance Program was a good idea, it is far harder to maintain from an ethical standpoint.
"The real question is, will New York continue to allow these funds to be used in this way, or if the situation has gotten to the point where changes need to be implemented," Beene said.
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