EXCLUSIVE — The Department of Health and Human Services is scrutinizing the automatic deduction of union dues from home healthcare workers pay by state Medicaid programs as part of the Trump administration’s broader goal of reducing waste in social safety net programs.Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz is requesting that nine states conduct an audit of their Medicaid programs to ensure that union dues for home healthcare workers are not automatically deducted from payments without the employees’ explicit consent. The action could cut some funding from public sector unions that are typically aligned with Democrats.Most of the roughly 3.2 million home health workers in the United States are not employed by corporations, but are hired and fired directly by clients and are reimbursed by Medicaid. This means that they have the status of public-sector workers who benefit from public sector union contracts.
CMS asked the governors of nine states — California, Illinois, Washington, Oregon, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Minnesota, New York, and Missouri — to ensure that they obtain explicit consent from home health workers reimbursed by Medicaid before automatically deducting their union dues.Oz wrote in an email to the governors, along with the letter, that the audit request “will greatly assist CMS in advancing our shared priorities of protecting taxpayer funds and ensuring compliance with all applicable federal regulations.”“As part of CMS’s ongoing efforts to crush fraud, waste, and abuse in the Medicaid program, we recognize the need to further understand the role that unions play in your state and how your state handles third party union payments,” Oz wrote in the email.
