“While federal law requires Medicaid payments to be made directly to the service providers, several states began flouting the requirement in the 1990s, by diverting portions of the payments toward union dues.
In 2017, eight states took approximately $150 million in Medicaid payments from the wages of more than 350,000 caregivers, according to a report by the Freedom Foundation, a non-profit that has led the fight to curtail the practice.
“Caregivers deserve to be able to choose how to spend their wages after they’ve been paid in full for their services,” said Maxford Nelsen, the director of labor policy at the Freedom Foundation. “If they wish to support a union, that’s up to them. But giving unions access to caregivers’ paychecks has enabled them to exploit caregivers, using an array of unethical and illegal schemes, up to and including forging signatures on membership forms.”
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