The Hochul administration softened its deadline for a pro-union overhaul of the state’s $9 billion home care system -– after a rollout so chaotic one insider called it “a s–t show.”
Gov. Kathy Hochul is set to release a plan with only days until an April 1 deadline for more than 280,000 home care recipients to transition to a handpicked firm for payment processing, The Post has learned.
The Department of Health said it would announce “a plan to protect consumers and workers who require some additional time to transition” although it said it was still holding to the deadline for the consumer directed personal assistance program, or CDPAP.
Hochul handpicked Public Partnerships LLC as a new middleman to consolidate payroll services from hundreds of firms, a move supported by an influential health care union that could gain thousands of new members through unionizing aides under the program.
But a whistleblower said PPL has been inundated with phone calls and struggling to meet the demand to try to hit the deadline.
“It’s unimaginable. We’ve gone from the frying pan to the fire,” the PPL employee said.
Hundreds of callers are on hold by 8 a.m. when workers sign on for the day, and hundreds are still waiting on hold by the end of the business day, the worker said — meaning consumers and caregivers have to call back and try again the next day.
“Thousands of calls a day are getting abandoned,” the source said, claiming that management is ramping up pressure and “micromanaging” agents’ time.
The company’s workforce, which is working remotely and has recently been bolstered with agents from outside New York in the last few weeks despite PPL saying its employees would be based locally.
Critics of the transition recently protested outside a vacant office space belonging to the company near Albany.
“If we had another year or two, it might work. But as it stands, it’s a s–t show. It’s a s–t show,” the whistleblower noted.
The Hochul administration’s turnaround comes after weeks of insisting the rollout was going to plan.
As of Thursday, 200,000 consumers had started to transition, according to PPL — leaving tens of thousands more unaccounted for.
A spokesperson for PPL did not address a question from The Post Sunday asking if the company still believed it would be able to make the deadline.
The source pointed out that thousands of consumers are still missing some piece of documentation needed to sign up with the new firm, which is responsible for making sure their caregiver gets paid out from Medicaid.
Meanwhile, the source notes that PPL is cutting significant corners.
The company is not reviewing I-9 employment verification forms submitted by personal assistants, they said.
Additionally, PPL is not requiring personal assistants to have their consumer sign off on their timecards –undermining a key tenant of the system meant to stop the widespread waste, fraud and abuse that has caused the program to balloon to upwards of $9 billion a year, per the whistleblower.
“The first thing I heard when I saw that was ‘fraud’ in big neon lights,” the whistleblower said.
The PPL spokesperson claims that I-9’s are being reviewed and that consumers will have to sign off on timecards.
A copy of PPL training materials shared with The Post states “timesheets will not need approval for now.” In the notes section of the same power point slide, PPL writes: “There is no approval for Timesheets. None. Zero.”
The source said agents are regularly having to combat “deliberate misinformation” given to consumers and PAs by their existing fiscal intermediaries, which stand to lose business due to the switch.
The misinformation is also accompanying a multi million dollar lobbying and advertising campaign trying to stop the transition. The health department has spent millions in its own effort to boost the alleged benefits of the transition, The Post reported last month.
On April 1, thousands of people whose PAs don’t complete the transition could end up forced into hospitals or nursing facilities, the healthcare plans that financially underpin the program warned in a letter to Hochul pleading with her to delay the transition last month.
On Thursday, even powerful healthcare union 1199SEIU — which stands to make millions by unionizing the PAs and has been accused in court of helping rig the bid for PPL — urged to ease the deadline pressure.
“With over 100,000 workers who still need to start their registration process, there must be immediate and urgent action to mitigate disruption for consumers and the workers who care for them before April 10th, when workers on a weekly payroll would expect to be paid for hours beginning after April 1st,” 1199SEIU President George Gresham wrote in the statement.
The union is joining a number of other groups in calling for the delay, including lawmakers who approved the deal during last year’s budget process.
“The bottom line is that we took the governor’s word that she could get this done with this organization,” state Sen. Leroy Comrie (D-Queens) told reporters at a press conference calling for a delay last week.
“A lot of people had doubts. I had doubts from the beginning and it’s only showing that we were all right,” Comrie said.
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