A report last year by the Albany-based Empire Center indicates that for fiscal year 2017-18, the Schenectady police force had the highest average pay at $94,817 for cities in the Capital Region and upstate New York, slightly above the statewide average. Read More
Albany-based think tank Empire Center attributed it in part to rising Medicaid enrollment, the minimum wage increase and a budget gimmick used earlier this year by Gov. Andrew Cuomo to delay paying Medicaid costs. Closing the gap in 2020 will likely require major cuts to medical services, or a plan to find enough savings elsewhere in the budget. Read More
Bill Hammond, health policy director for the Empire Center for Public Policy, offered a different take on the state's Medicaid spending. In a recent report, he pointed out the state, by 2016, was spending $3,236 per resident on its Medicaid program, 79 percent above the national average. Read More
Cuomo’s first MRT made “real progress” and could do so again, said Bill Hammond, director of health policy for the Empire Center, a fiscally conservative think tank. But much depends on the team, Hammond said. “If it’s structured that same way, where the biggest recipients of Medicaid money are running the show, and the global cap has been weakened, and the governor’s political capital on this issue is diminished, the question is how effective will that be,” he said. Read More
Cuomo quietly increased Medicaid payments by 2 percent to hospitals and 1.5 percent to nursing homes just before Election Day in 2018 at a time when Medicaid spending was running hundreds of millions of dollars higher than expected, according to a report by the Empire Center, an Albany think tank. Cuomo than reversed course and cut most Medicaid payments by 1 percent early this year. Read More
Budget watchdogs criticized the state’s practice of pushing overruns into future years, and said the commission's revival felt too little too late. "The need to reconvene this was clear a year ago," said E.J. McMahon, from the conservative Manhattan Institute. "Delaying until now is just tactics, not a solution." McMahon said the earlier Medicaid overhaul managed to curb spending, starting around 2011, but the lid -- a 3-percent growth cap -- started to come off in recent years. Read More
Tim Hoefer, executive director of the Empire Center, said that by continuing to bust its overtime budget, MTA officials “are not showing us that they can manage it in a way that is fiscally prudent." He noted that controlling overtime is especially important, given that it is factored into employees’ pension earnings. Read More
Bill Hammond of the Empire Center, a conservative think tank, said some of the language Cuomo used in his budget address presented an ominous sign that the Medicaid Redesign Team, tasked with finding $2.5 billion in saving, could shift the burden to New York businesses and residents in the form of health insurance taxes. Read More