Before other states start to consider minimum wage increases for home care workers, it would be beneficial for them to understand what has – and hasn’t – gone well in New York.
In the spring of 2022, New York legislators passed a law that gave home care workers an extra $1 per hour above the state’s $15 minimum wage. Another $2 per hour will kick in for those workers in Oct. 2023.
The state then told Medicaid providers that it was committed to compensating them for the added costs associated with the wage increase, which could be as much as $5 billion in 2023, per the New York state government. Most of that money would flow to personal care.
What has materialized thus far hasn’t been what advocates imagined when pushing for the increase in the first place.
“I’m sympathetic to the idea that home health aides are doing important work,” Bill Hammond, senior fellow for public policy at Empire Center, told Home Health Care News. “It can be hard on them physically and emotionally, but the state is already making a lot of questionable choices, fiscally. I think they’re also vulnerable to abuse and an overuse of the Medicaid benefit. If they’re not making any obvious efforts to contain those, and the costs are rising at an unsustainable rate, that all is going to have ripple effects.”
At the same time, home care workers are arguing that the money – which is meant to pay home care agencies enough to cover wages, payroll taxes, benefits and other costs – is not getting to them.
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