NYC’s Medicaid homecare industry may have friends in the Chinese regime

The Community Homecare Consortium is a coalition of Medicaid homecare nonprofits operating in New York City that work to expand their bloated and fraud-plagued industry. The manager of this consortium is the Chinese-American Planning Council (CAPC), a left-wing group with financial ties to banks and other firms affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Though the development has received little to no media attention until now, the CAPC has quietly become a central influencer within one of the biggest industries in America’s biggest city.

The New York Homecare Problem

Created by the federal government in the 1980s, the intended purpose of the homecare program was to allow Medicaid to more efficiently help elderly and disabled Americans who cannot care for themselves. The program permits states to use federal Medicaid funding to pay family members, friends, and agencies to take care of patients in their homes. Since most of them don’t need daily, trained medical assistance, the presumption is the program can both save money for the taxpayers and maximize benefit options for patients.

Initially a small project, today’s Medicaid homecare program is now a $145 billion per year monstrosity with 8.4 million patients enrolled. If we charitably and hypothetically assume no financial shenanigans, this means 2.5 percent of the entire American population (every single man, woman and child) supposedly needs and qualifies for this assistance.

It has become particularly large in New York:

• According to a June 2026 report from Vital City, one out of nine members of the entire New York City workforce is a home healthcare worker.
• In 2024, the Bureau of Labor Statistics found that the state of New York has 171 home health aides for every 1,000 total seniors, more than double the national average of 68.
• In 2024, “Home Health and Personal Care Aide” was the most common job in the state of New York, and there were nearly three times more home health aides than the second-place job, “Retail Salespersons.”
• The Bureau of Labor Statistics also found that a staggering 69 percent of all job growth in the state of New York since February 2020 came from “Home Health Services & Social Assistance.”
• In 2023, a New York audit of its Electronic Visit Verification (EVV) anti-fraud systems found that more than $14 billion was paid to homecare providers that submitted no EVV records at all, and that no homecare claim had ever been denied for lack of verification because the feature that would have denied claims lacking EVV was never “turned on.”

The Medicaid homecare program has been defrauded at an industrial scale across the country. The size of the New York program makes it a target for benefits fraud so pervasive that it can be thought of as a form of universal basic income for anyone willing to tell a few lies.

The Community Homecare Consortium

The Community Homecare Consortium, formerly known as the Community-Based Home Care Workgroup, is a coalition of nine New York City nonprofits that received a combined $445 million from various government entities for homecare services for their most recently reported year. The group claimed to provide homecare services to roughly 11,000 people, which comes out to $40,000 per patient. [1]

In 2026 the Community Homecare Consortium was listed as an exhibitor at the annual conference of ADVancing States, a Medicaid homecare trade association funded and run by corporations, nonprofits, and bureaucrats that administer homecare programs while fighting against common sense anti-fraud policies. The Consortium’s exhibitor profile claimed nine nonprofit members that service 11,000 patients and employ 14,000 New Yorkers. The most recent official estimates suggest New York City is home to just under 200,000 home health and personal care aides, which would imply the Community Homecare Consortium employs more than seven percent of all homecare workers in the city.

The CAPC

The Community Homecare Consortium does not appear to be a legally incorporated organization though. It has no functioning website and doesn’t seem to have filed incorporation paperwork with the IRS or any other government agency. Rather, the consortium appears to exist as a policy-advocacy project within the Chinese-American Planning Council (CAPC), which is listed as the sole contact for the Consortium on the Consortium’s policy advocacy materials, which are published only on the CAPC website.

The CAPC is a left-wing organization active in several areas of policy advocacy that has been investigated by congress for its alleged links to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). According to the Daily Caller, the group has received at least $445,969 in relatively small increments from sources such as China’s state-controlled Industrial and Commercial Bank of China and the Bank of China, and other organizations with less-concrete CCP ties such as the Bank of East Asia, the Charles B. Wang Community Health Center, and the Committee of 100.

The group was investigated by congress after undercover video emerged in 2025 showing CAPC staff advising illegal immigrants on the best practices for evading arrest and deportation by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

The CAPC also runs a homecare agency, operated within the Chinese-American Planning Council Home Attendant Program, one of the CAPC’s many legally affiliated nonprofits. In the latest fiscal year covering parts of 2024 and 2025 the group reported generating $175 million in revenue from the homecare program and providing services to thousands of patients.

Calls for billions in additional spending

Leveraging its size, the CAPC-led Consortium has operated as a discrete policy hub for New York City homecare nonprofits for years, working to influence New York’s homecare policies from behind the scenes. In 2023, the CAPC, apparently acting as the voice and leadership of the Consortium, published a list of members and “Core Policy Priorities” that laid out a vision for dramatically expanding the homecare program. The consortium claimed that “racial, economic and gender justice need to be addressed as a top priority” and that New York needed to pass the “Fair Pay for Home Care” bill which would raise homecare wages even higher than the then-freshly raised wages approved in New York’s 2022-2023 budget. CAPC concedes this would cost “between $3 and $4.5 billion,” though they quickly clarify that the expense “could be supported with federal funds.”

CAPC’s main concern, though, was for themselves, not their workers. The homecare agencies, the policy platform says, are at the mercy of “MLTCs,” managed long term care programs and “MCOs” managed care organizations, the for-profit insurance and healthcare companies the state contracts to run the homecare programs. The state hires the MLTCs and MCOs, which handle payments to agencies such as the Consortium’s members, who then pay the wages of the homecare workers under their supervision.

The Consortium wanted the wage increases for their workers, but only if the state “ensure[d] that MCOs and MLTCs provide sufficient rates to cover these increases” and “set minimum requirements for payments from Medicaid managed care plans to home care providers.”

The Consortium’s policy priorities also included suspending New York’s “13-hour rule” which stipulates that full-time live-in homecare workers are only paid for a maximum of 13 hours a day, with the remaining 11 hours subtracted for sleep and meals. Instead, CHC suggests New York reimburse for all 24 hours of the shift at a cost of “at least $1.1 billion,” supposedly to simplify paperwork and protect agencies from accusations of labor law violations.

Allegations of fraud and financial misdeeds

Several of the Community Homecare Consortium’s current and former members have found themselves at the wrong end of law enforcement probes into fraud, improper payments, and wage withholding.

The CAPC is the most notable example. In 2023 the CAPC Home Attendant Program settled with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services for $866,000 to resolve allegations that the CAPC employed a homecare attendant who was on the Medicaid exclusion list, a list of persons prohibited from being paid with Medicaid funds because of previous fraud or criminal convictions. This is no small fine, and employing someone on the exclusion list is a big “oops” for a group as well-established in the industry as CAPC. The settlement suggests the CAPC is failing to follow some important compliance and anti-fraud rules.

The CAPC Home Attendant Program has also paid large sums to New York’s powerful homecare labor union. In 2023, the CAPC and seven other Consortium members were named as part of a 1199SEIU arbitration process that resulted in the CAPC affiliate and 41 other similar agencies paying a combined $34 million in underpaid wages to roughly 57,000 workers.

The only sure thing in a war between nonprofits and labor unions is that the taxpayer paying the bills will always lose.

A 2021 version of the Consortium’s policy priorities platform, archived in New York Assembly records, shows the CHC once had eleven members, rather than the nine it claims today. One of the missing, BHRAGS Home Care Corp, might be explained by the fact that Jean Ronald Tirelus and Roberto Samedy, the former chairman of the board and executive director of the group, respectively, were indicted in March 2026 by the U.S. Department of Justice. The DoJ news release listed among the offenses “wire fraud, embezzlement, and bribery-related offenses, and conspiracy to commit the same, as well as money laundering conspiracy.” The government alleges the pair embezzled more than $1.3 million from the group while also taking bribes and kickbacks.

The BHRAGS pair are presumed innocent, until proven guilty. But despite these felonious financial allegations made against them, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani subsequently awarded the group $200 million in additional contracts to operate homeless shelters alongside the troubled homecare program.

Another current member of the Consortium, Regional Aid for Interim Needs (RAIN) Home Attendant Services, agreed to an $800,000 settlement with New York’s Medicaid program after RAIN allegedly diverted taxpayer funds toward paying off the mortgage of a vacant building owned by an affiliate.

The financial forest fire

To be fair, the adage, “where there’s smoke, there’s fire” is far from perfect. Nearly everyone accused of bad things has an excuse. Sometimes, it’s a good one. The Chinese-American Planning Council and members of the Community Homecare Consortium may have benign explanations for each specific allegation of domestic financial misconduct and financial connections to the Chinese Communist Party.

But step back from these specific trees and look instead at the general forest. Heavy smoke is billowing from multiple trees at once. The one allegation nobody can make with a straight face is that the Medicaid homecare program generally and the New York program specifically are fine examples of government honesty and efficiency.

Instead, it’s more reasonable to assume we have a raging wildfire of financial misdeeds that has been out of control for decades. And if so, then what’s on fire hasn’t been trees, but the hard-earned money taken from our paychecks that was supposed to be used to help the vulnerable among us.

***

Endnote

[1] The total received by the nine groups homecare services in the 2024-25 fiscal year is the best possible approximation of homecare revenues taken from the most recent available IRS form 990 for each of the nine member organizations. The revenue totals were taken from either the government grants revenue or the program service revenue (PSR) numbers that were available on each group’s Form 990, depending on which number was available and most accurately reflected the scope of the group’s homecare work. The numbers for each group are provided below, along with a link to the source and an explanation of which revenue figure from the 990 was used.

• Chinese American Planning Council Home Attendant Program Inc., $174,566,646.00, Chinese-american Planning Council Home Attendant Program Inc, Full Filing – Nonprofit Explorer – Pro…, personal care services PSR.
• The Jewish Association For Services For The Aged, $38,590,139.00, The Jewish Association For Services For The Aged, Full Filing – Nonprofit Explorer – ProPublica, government grants.
• New York Foundation for Senior Citizens Home Attendant Services, $25,583,340.00 New York Foundation For Senior Citizens Home Attendant Services I, Full Filing – Nonprofit Explorer …, government grants.
• RAIN Home Attendant Services, $33,555,066.00 R A I N Home Attendant Services Inc, Full Filing – Nonprofit Explorer – ProPublica, managed care revenue PSR + Medicaid revenue PSR.
• RiseBoro Home Care, $31,688,369.00, Riseboro Homecare Inc, Full Filing – Nonprofit Explorer – ProPublica, managed care revenue PSR + Medicaid revenue PSR.
• Rockaway Home Attendant Services $35,931,556.00, Rockaway Home Attendant Services Inc, Full Filing – Nonprofit Explorer – ProPublica, managed care revenue PSR.
• Selfhelp Community Services, $32,764,293.00, Selfhelp Community Services Inc, Full Filing – Nonprofit Explorer – ProPublica, home care services PSR.
• Nicks Alliance Home Care, $28,424,622.00, St Nicks Alliance Home Care Corp, Full Filing – Nonprofit Explorer – ProPublica, home care program PSR.
• Sunnyside Community Services, $44,254,388.00, Sunnyside Home Care Project Inc, Full Filing – Nonprofit Explorer – ProPublica, managed care PSR.

Source: https://capitalresearch.org/article/nycs-medicaid-homecare-industry-may-have-friends-in-the-chinese-regime/