By Raga Justin

Lt. Gov. Antonio Delgado further aligned himself Wednesday with disgruntled advocates and users of the state’s Medicaid-funded Consumer Directed Personal Assistance Program, calling the ongoing transition of the home care program to a private contractor a “failure of leadership” under Gov. Kathy Hochul.

Delgado, who is challenging Hochul in the 2026 Democratic primary, did not shy away from criticizing the governor during a rally outside the Latham headquarters of Public Partnerships LLC, the state’s new vendor overseeing the home care program. He added he has not spoken to Hochul on this matter or any others in months.

“It gets to a point where you ask yourself, what was the genesis of this? What was the impetus? What was the rationale?” Delgado said. “And the fact that New Yorkers can’t get a meeting with the governor. … Folks who are struggling trying to understand a way out of this, can’t get a conversation. At the end of the day, we have to ask ourselves, as New Yorkers, are we here to deliver care with compassion or with convenience?”

The transition of the program to Public Partnerships has frustrated many workers and also patients with long-term medical needs who have used the program to pay for personal, in-home care.

The overhaul, which has cost the state billions even as budget officials have justified the move as helping clamp down on fraud and over-spending, has been beset by problems. An ongoing court case has delayed Public Partnerships’s full administrative takeover of the home care program for months. The company’s former president and CEO stepped down earlier this month, a leadership transition that company officials have said was planned.

And the company last week deflected allegations that an employee had siphoned off payments meant to go to workers through the program. A spokeswoman for Public Partnerships disputed the claims of internal theft, first reported by the New York Post, and said the company had found that no funds were diverted from workers. Instead, an employee of an agency working with Public Partnerships had created false timesheets with hours they had not worked, the spokeswoman said, adding that those funds have been recovered.

State lawmakers have said they remain unconvinced Public Partnerships is competent to handle the administrative takeover of the program. A legislative hearing is schedule in August to examine the ongoing issues facing the company.

During Wednesday’s rally, Delgado championed the consumers using the program and condemned Hochul and other state officials who decided to sign the multibillion-dollar contract with Public Partnerships last year.

Despite being a member of Hochul’s administration — he officially functions as her second-in-command — Delgado said he was not given the opportunity to weigh in on the decision to transition to Public Partnerships before it was made.

But he said as the outcry grew, “It became clear to me that I had to do what was right for New York, leverage the position that I am in as lieutenant governor, to elevate these voices.”“It just gets to a point … a tipping point gets reached,” Delgado added on his decision to speak out.

Sam Spokony, a spokesman for Hochul, said the governor’s administration had saved the home-care program from a fiscal crisis by removing hundreds of fiscal intermediaries, or home care agencies that previously served as financial middlemen between the program and consumers. Those agencies have been accused of ballooning Medicaid expenses and engaging in rampant fraud.

“Anyone trying to undermine our much-needed reforms should just be clear that they want to send New York back to an old system that enabled waste, fraud and abuse of taxpayer funds and put CDPAP at risk for the people who rely on it,” Spokony said. “Along with protecting the long-term sustainability of CDPAP, New York’s shift to a single fiscal intermediary gives the state greater ability to monitor and oversee the program — and we’re closely monitoring this transition and can take any action needed to address any potential issues.”

Yet people who use the program and aides have continued to plead with Hochul to terminate the contract with Public Partnerships and return to the old decentralized system.They point to issues with workers getting paid and other technical glitches that have plagued the Public Partnerships rollout.

And many have seized on the disputed allegations of theft from within the company as further evidence that Public Partnerships is not looking out for patients and workers. That employee had allegedly been directing paychecks meant to go to workers to other bank accounts, some of them overseas, according to the New York Post.

“You don’t have to be a genius to see what’s going on here,” said Charles Hudson, a Syracuse home care aide who uses the program to care for his mother. “PPL isn’t just incompetent — it’s full on fraud. They’ll say it’s a rogue employee that’s just acting out and then they’ll say we’re fixing it. …But we know that’s a lie. Stealing wages from workers and robbing consumers of their care is PPL’s entire business model.

”A class-action lawsuit filed against the state Department of Health this year by a legal advocacy group will be settled this August. That lawsuit had delayed parts of the program’s transition to Public Partnerships and allowed some of the fiscal intermediaries to continue operating as state officials tried to reach thousands of patients who had not enrolled with the company yet.

A spokesperson for Public Partnerships said in a statement that the transition was “necessary to bring consistency and accountability to a fragmented system, while saving New Yorkers’ money without reducing care.”