By: Anthony Delgado

Source: Times Union

When I travel across New York, I meet families doing everything they can to care for their loved ones at home — aging parents, disabled children, partners battling illness. For many of them, the Consumer-Directed Personal Assistance Program is more than a Medicaid service. It’s a lifeline.

That lifeline is unraveling.

Since Gov. Kathy Hochul handed control of CDPAP to a private equity-backed corporation called Public Partnerships LLC (PPL), older and disabled New Yorkers are losing access to the care they need to live with dignity. Tens of thousands of caregivers — overwhelmingly women, immigrants and low-income workers — have been unpaid or underpaid. Entire families are being thrown into crisis, and upstate communities are being hit the hardest.

This is what I’ve heard firsthand.

I’ve sat with caregivers who’ve gone weeks without a paycheck, forced to choose between buying groceries or paying rent. I’ve spoken with daughters who’ve lost the aides who cared for their parents because those aides couldn’t afford to keep working under PPL’s broken system. I’ve heard from people with disabilities who’ve been stranded in hospital beds while waiting for their services to be reinstated.

What’s worse is that these stories have been met with indifference.

The administration has blamed technical glitches, workers, even the very families relying on CDPAP — instead of acknowledging the truth: This transition was poorly planned, poorly executed and driven by a misguided belief that centralizing care under one corporate vendor would save the state money. It hasn’t. In fact, it’s already costing more — in human terms and fiscal ones.

According to a class action lawsuit filed by CDPAP workers, represented in part by the Legal Aid Society, tens of thousands of employees have either not been paid at all, have been paid late, or have been subjected to arbitrary deductions and underpayment; thousands of New Yorkers have lost or are losing access to care; and workers are being forced into predatory health insurance plans operated by companies with long histories of fraud.

Perhaps most troubling of all is how this contract was awarded in the first place. The Hochul administration exempted the PPL deal from independent oversight, bypassing the state comptroller and the standard public contracting rules that exist to prevent abuse. Whistleblowers have raised serious concerns that this entire process was predetermined, with eligibility criteria tailored to all but guarantee PPL would win. For a $9 billion program that touches the lives of hundreds of thousands of workers and patients, that kind of secrecy is unacceptable.

This was not a glitch. This was a failure of leadership.

CDPAP works because it puts care in the hands of people who know and love each other — not corporations. It’s rooted in community, flexibility and trust. That trust has been shattered.

The families affected by this crisis deserve more than empty promises and press releases. That’s why I’m calling on New York to terminate its contract with PPL.

We need to restore trusted, community-based providers to stabilize the system. We need an independent audit of PPL’s payroll failures and a full accounting of the wages owed. And we need to ensure no caregiver is forced into junk insurance plans that put their health at risk.

The promise of home care is simple: that New Yorkers can age and heal in the places they call home, surrounded by the people they love. It’s a promise that should unite us across party lines, across regions, across backgrounds.

The state has a choice: We can choose compassion over convenience. We can choose listening over deflection. And we can choose to put care — real care — at the center of how we govern.

Let’s start by doing right by the people who’ve been harmed. And let’s make sure we never again let a private equity firm dictate how we care for our own.