Report: NYC’s Job Boom Fueled by Taxpayer-Funded Home Health Work

Taxpayer funds are reportedly driving the recent job boom in New York City through a 2015 policy change that loosened eligibility Medicaid benefit rules.

The revelation suggests that New York City Mayor Eric Adams’ acclaimed credit for creating 300,000 jobs since the pandemic actually results from taxpayers’ subsidy due to a policy change.

• Almost nearly all the job increases were created in publicly funded home health care, city documents show
• Manufacturing, construction, and retail sunk below levels in 2020

The rules permit people “eligible for home healthcare services to hire family members or close friends to care for them and be paid for their work through state Medicaid funds,” Bloomberg reported:

Virtually all of the jobs added in the 12 months ended in March were in home health care, a low-paying but rapidly swelling field. It’s technically classified as private employment, but home health care is actually paid for primarily through publicly funded health programs like Medicaid, where soaring costs are a looming threat to the New York state budget.

If not for the gains in home health care — where average annual wages statewide are $38,280 — the city’s total private-sector jobs would have contracted over the past year, city financial documents published in April show.

Excluding the “education and health” sector, where all of the growth was in health care, New York City lost 14,100 private-sector jobs in the year through March, according to city budget documents. The declines have been particularly acute in manufacturing, construction and professional and business services, which typically pay significantly higher wages.