Late last, year liberal New York Governor Kathy Hochul attacked a Medicaid home care program for seniors as “one of the most abused programs in the entire history of the state of New York.” She noted that young family members “can make $37 an hour by sitting home with your Grandma.” She correctly called this program “a racket.”

Thanks – in part – to this program, New York’s state-share Medicaid costs have nearly doubled in just five years:

And because New York exploits federal matching funds, that means federal taxpayers are paying too. Federal Medicaid spending to New York rose 21.2% in just the past year, to $69 billion.

But that’s only half of the scam.

Our friend Mark Mix of the National Right to Work Committee notes that some of this money is pipelined straight into the bank accounts of the state’s union bosses.

The Service Employees International Union (SEIU), NYC’s largest health care union “has a government privilege that allows them to skim dues payments from the payouts of home health recipients (without any positive consent from them), as well as health care workers under the union’s bargaining control across New York City.”

Two questions:

First: Why would someone taking care of their grandmother at home have to be a member of a union?

Second: Why hasn’t New York or the GOP Congress shutdown these graft payments from taxpayers’ wallets to union coffers?