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Testimony of Bill Hammond Senior Fellow for Health Policy, Empire Center for Public Policy Before the Joint Legislative Fiscal Committees February 11, 2025 Read More

The Health Department has been either unable or unwilling to document the eligibility status of almost one million Medicaid recipients, raising further concern about the possibility of large-scale over-enrollment. Read More

Two New York Police Department retirees each collected total retirement benefits of more than $600,000 last year—a new record high for the NYPD, according to data posted on SeeThroughNY, the Empire Center’s government transparency website. However, unlike the pension systems covering all other public employees in New York State, the New York City Police Pension Fund refuses to identify its top two pensioners, or any of its 53,215 NYPD retirees receiving benefit payments that totaled $3.3 billion last year. Read More

New Yorkers by a margin of more than two-to-one said they aren’t getting their money’s worth from taxes they pay in the state, according to recent polling by the Empire Center for Public Policy in Albany.  Read More

Although Governor Hochul said last week that the current trajectory of Medicaid spending is "not sustainable," the upward trend is even steeper than she and her budget director have acknowledged. Read More

New York in 2022 told school districts they’d be barred from purchasing gasoline- or diesel-powered buses after 2027, and instead have to buy electric buses at more than double the upfront cost. “The purchase of new electric buses will help grow the market,” officials later pledged, “which will in turn help reduce prices.” Unfortunately for taxpayers, those reductions aren’t materializing—because state officials put the prices, and future increases, on cruise control. Read More

Perhaps the most damning commentary on Gov. Hochul’s Medicaid spending plan — which made up roughly half of the $252 billion state budget she released Tuesday — was the silence of the attack dogs. Last year, the hospital lobby spent millions on TV ads falsely accusing Hochul of “cutting” the state-run health plan, which covers 7 million lower-income New Yorkers. This year, the ad campaign has gone quiet, a sign she is giving hospitals everything they could want and more. Read More

Financing and regulating health care delivery is one of the biggest responsibilities of state government, yet Governor Hochul had remarkably little to say on that topic in her State of the State speech on Tuesday. Read More