Organizations representing home health workers are trying to convince Gov. Kathy Hochul to reverse a provision tucked into last year’s state budget that left many providers without a much-needed revenue stream while boosting funds flowing to a powerful politically connected union.
The provision decreased a state-funded supplement for the wages of home health workers and was quietly slipped into the deal after weeks of negotiations behind closed doors.
Simultaneously, lawmakers agreed to increase funding for an obscure health department program that directs cash to home health agencies primarily affiliated with the powerful healthcare workers union, 1199 SEIU.
Organizations representing home healthcare workers are now venting their frustrations over the agreement and are calling on lawmakers and the governor to reverse it in this year’s budget.
“We were shocked when the budget deal was announced last year that expected home healthcare aides, a group largely of immigrant women working their first job in the U.S, to pay for their increase in the minimum wage increase with a reduction of benefit,” Connor Shaw, political director for Home Healthcare Workers of America, a union representing some agencies in New York, told The Post.
Since 2016, home healthcare workers in New York City as well as Nassau, Suffolk and Westchester Counties received an additional supplemental payment on top of their base wages. This payment could either pass through directly to workers, or home health agencies could use it for other benefits like health coverage.
Last year in New York City, workers received an additional $4.09 per hour on top of their $17 hourly base wage. In 2024, the minimum wage increased by $1.55 an hour to $18.55, but the new deal decreased the wage supplement by the same amount.
That meant workers who collected their entire base wage as well as the supplement didn’t see any impact of increased minimum wage. Home health agencies that utilized the supplement to cover the costs of benefits were left trying to make up for the loss.
The budget deal was first acknowledged in a report last year by the Empire Center for Public Policy.
Natalie Krivoruk, Administrator of Advantage Home Care in Brooklyn, says her agency provides an essential health coverage plan in addition to other benefits for employees like counseling services, English language training and a pilot program for childcare.
Those additional benefits, Krivoruk says, are extremely popular and her firm had an 80% retention rate of around 1,200 employees last year.
“I think we’ve done a great job in providing employees with incentives they’re looking for, and it shows and it shows in our result,” Krivoruk told the Post. “People are not leaving us, people are coming to us.”
But, Krivoruk said, those additional benefits are in danger of having to be cut with the decrease in the wage supplement.
“Unfortunately for us, we don’t have enough funding to do that. Especially with the rates being squeezed right now,” she said.
Hochul’s budget office stood by the changes to wage parity supplements, arguing that they more directly benefit workers.
“Last year’s adjustment to wage supplements was a part of the State’s comprehensive approach to investing in increasing wages for home care workers,” a spokesperson for Hochul’s budget chief told the Post.
But, at the same time the state was adjusting wages for the workers, it was reinvesting the funding for the supplements to directly benefit a narrowly tailored health department program that funnels cash to a select group of home health agencies, most of which are represented by the political powerhouse healthcare union, 1199 SEIU.
The Quality Incentive Vital Access Provider Pool, or QIVAPP, program provides financial benefits from the state to pass through home health agencies to their health plans. To qualify, agencies have to prove they pay their employees a base wage and provide a certain amount of training. But, applications for QIVAPP haven’t been open for years.
Krivoruk said her agency applied for QIVAPP in 2017 but never heard back from the Department of Health.
Of the 69 providers currently enrolled in QIVAPP, 42 have bargaining agreements with 1199 SEIU.
The powerful union represents hundreds of thousands of members in the healthcare field throughout New York and has spent millions of dollars running one of the state’s most robust political operations.
Additional funding pumped from the state into QIVAPP has been keeping 1199’s struggling Home Health Worker Benefit Fund afloat. Publicly available reports show the benefit fund received $49 million in QIVAPP funds as part of the 2022-2023 state budget.
The latest filing even noted that the fund would go belly up, pushing its employees off to state-run essential plans, had they not gotten some more cash from Albany in last year’s budget.
“The Fund is also reliant on the continuation of QIVAPP funding to resolve its funding shortfall,” the report reads.
A spokesperson for 1199 said the union supports the governor’s move to decrease the wage parity supplements while increasing the overall wages for workers
“We supported an approach that would raise wages for workers, reduce opportunities for employers to misuse funds intended for benefits and continue to fund comprehensive benefits for union and nonunion employers who are legitimately providing them,” the spokesperson for 1199 said.
The spokesperson for Hochul’s budget chief framed last year’s decision to increase QIVAPP funding as an investment in bolstering “providers who provide health insurance to their workers,” but noted that reopening applications for more providers to join the program would cost too much for the state to handle.
“Further alterations or additions to the QIVAPP program would significantly increases costs which is simply not possible at this time,” the spokesperson told the Post.
Home health worker groups were shocked to find the provision included in the budget, but that shock has now turned to frustration.
“In effect, the state is picking the pockets of low-paid, non-unionized workers to bail out a union benefit fund,” Bill Hammond, Senior Fellow for Health Policy at the Empire Center for Public Policy told the Post.
“For all the talk in Albany about ‘fair pay for home care,’ the governor and Legislature approved this ugly deal with no hesitation and no public debate.”