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Private Equity Stakeholder Project: Private equity-backed PPL settles wage theft case, faces DOJ lawsuit. July 23, 2026 DW Healthcare- and Linden Capital-backed PPL settles $162 million wage theft class action, faces DOJ lawsuit Private equity firms DW Healthcare Partners and Linden Capital Partners are the largest owners of Public Partnerships, LLC (PPL). In late June, PPL agreed to pay $162 million to settle allegations that it systematically underpaid nearly 200,000 home health aides in New York. The settlement is the result of a class-action lawsuit alleging that PPL mismanaged payments after taking over New York's Consumer-Directed Personal Assistance Program (CDPAP). PPL is the largest provider of fiscal intermediary services in the US, primarily for Medicaid self-directed care programs, with over 50 programs in 20 states. Self-directed care allows eligible individuals to select their own known and trusted caregiver to provide care in their own home. PPL is accused of failing to pay workers in a timely manner, as well as failing to provide adequate health insurance. As a McKnights Home Care article explained, to comply with the New York Home Care Worker Parity Law, home health workers must "receive both slightly higher cash minimum wage and a supplemental compensation component, which can be paid in either cash or benefits. PPL chose to fulfill the benefit supplement with a health plan." The money for the mandatory health plan was deducted from wages at 40 cents per hour from workers' paychecks. The nonprofit newsroom New York Focus "estimated that PPL could make as much as $60 million in annual profits from the plan." Meanwhile, home health aides in New York typically make about $20 per hour. The lawyers for the class action lawsuit alleged that the "plan provided little or no value to the personal assistants because it only covered the most basic of preventive healthcare and didn't provide any coverage for things like illness or injury or hospitalization." As part of the settlement, PPL agreed to end the mandatory health plan that provided inadequate and costly coverage for employees. The settlement is believed to be the largest wage-and-hour class action settlement in New York and one of the largest nationally. Under the terms of the settlement, PPL agreed to pay $40.5 million for general damages, $25 million for previous health insurance payments, $92 million for unused vacation days, and $4.5 million in an additional reserve fund. The payments will be distributed to roughly 200,000 home health aides in New York City, Long Island, and Westchester County. On average, workers will receive $680 from the settlement, which amounts to more than a week's payment for many home health aides. Around 50,000 workers will receive more, between $1,000 and $1,800, from the settlement. The transition to PPL as the fiscal intermediary for the CDPAP came with significant challenges. Renee Christian, a community advocate with New York Caring Majority, an organization made up of people with disabilities, older adults and home care workers, said that she has lost several aides as a result of the challenging transition to PPL. In a separate suit filed last month, the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) alleged that "PPL created an artificially attractive proposal by making repeated material misrepresentations in its bid regarding the nature and amounts of costs that it would charge to administer the program." The DOJ lawsuit filed on June 16, 2026 alleges that PPL misrepresented its ability to conduct the transition effectively and on time. The suit alleges that by PPL hiring temporary employees to assist patients with enrollment, but failing to adequately train them, many callers faced long wait times and ended up hanging up before registering. The lawsuit claims that, "because of PPL's botched and dysfunctional transition, CDPAP patients have experienced disrupted care and lost their chosen caregivers - including caregivers who had cared for them for years and with whom they shared strong bonds of trust." Additionally, the DOJ lawsuit alleges that PPL has extracted profits from direct care costs through hourly rates. The lawsuit reads, "Because CDPAP bills approximately 350 million hours of care to New York each year, even taking a few cents per hour as revenue would mean tens of millions of dollars in ill-gotten gains." Analysis attached to an email from a PPL vice president to a PPL executive showed that PPL could pocket up to 20% to 35% of the difference between CDPAP plan rates for caregiver per-hour compensation and caregiver wages. As states face growing pressure to implement new Medicaid requirements that depend on complex eligibility systems and frequent verification checks, states may be incentivized to outsource that work to third party middlemen like PPL. The growing role of private equity in public health infrastructure calls for an increasing need for oversight and accountability, as outlined in PESP's May 2026 Middlemen in Medicaid report. July 23, 2026

PPL reaches proposed $162M settlement with NY CDPAP caregivers. A federal judge has preliminarily approved a $162 million class action settlement to approximately 200,000 home care workers over alleged payroll and benefits violations after New York transitioned its Medicaid-funded Consumer Directed Personal Assistance Program (CDPAP) to a single fiscal intermediary. News of the proposed settlement comes weeks after the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) filed a separate lawsuit against PPL, as well as the New York Department of Health, over an alleged fraud scheme. The case is one of the first private class action lawsuits that would be settled under the New York Home Care Worker Parity Act - a state law mandating that Medicaid-reimbursed home aides are paid a base wage plus supplemental benefits, according to the plaintiffs' attorneys. The New York CDPAP is a state Medicaid program that allows individuals with assistance needs to select caregivers, called personal assistants, for home-based care. New York's Department of Health transitioned the program to have a single fiscal intermediary, and the process became embattled with extensions, a restraining order, lawsuits and protests. The settlement would provide the nearly 200,000 home care personal assistants with payments for general damages, lost benefits, the value of their accrued time off and other reliefs, according to the plaintiffs' lawyers. The Legal Aid Society and Katz Banks Kumin LLP represented the current and former CDPAP personal assistants who filed the lawsuit. "This settlement shows that New York's Home Care Worker Wage Parity Act provides meaningful benefits and protections for home care workers," said Hugh Baran, partner at Katz Banks Kumin LLP, in a July 1 statement. "The court's approval today marks a major step forward, and we look forward to final approval." A PPL spokesperson confirmed that the company reached a proposed agreement with the plaintiffs, adding, "We categorically deny the allegations in this lawsuit, and the settlement reflects no admission of liability or wrongdoing." "Now that the court has preliminarily approved the settlement, we look forward to continuing the settlement process so that we can put this matter behind us and devote our full attention to supporting the hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers who rely on CDPAP to receive care in their homes and communities," the PPL spokesperson told Home Health Care News in an email. Alleged misrepresentations Four current and former CDPAP personal assistants, Philip Calderon, Farshad Pinchasi, Allison Fields and Dana Folgar, filed the class action lawsuit Calderon v. Public Partnerships, LLC. They alleged that PPL did not pay personal assistants accurately and on time and failed to provide benefits compliant with the New York Home Care Worker Wage Parity Act, thereby violating state and federal law. News of the proposed settlement comes nearly two weeks after the Department of Justice filed a separate lawsuit against New York's Department of Health (DOH) and PPL, alleging that the deal funneled millions of dollars of extra revenue to PPL. The DOJ alleges that PPL made an "artificially attractive proposal by making repeated material misrepresentations" to win its bid as the DOH's sole fiscal intermediary for CDPAP, including misrepresentations of its staffing plan, financial readiness to perform the contract and the quality of its in-house software. Furthermore, the DOJ alleges that PPL added small profits to the cost of each care hour billed through CDPAP. This amounted to "tens of millions in ill-gotten gains" since CDPAP bills New York for around 350 million care hours each year, according to the suit. "The scheme has caused and continues to cause substantial harm to many thousands of vulnerable home-care Medicaid patients and caregivers, to small- and medium-sized New York businesses who were put out of business, and to the American taxpayer who ultimately is footing the bill," the DOJ alleged in the June 16 filing. By fall 2024, CDPAP was one of New York's largest health benefits programs with over 250,000 patients and 300,000 caregivers, according to the DOJ suit. Companies featured in this article: MK Manoylov is a Senior Reporter at Home Health Care News. Their work has appeared in publications including WebMD, Business Insider and LiveScience, in addition to governmental reports from the U.S. Department of the Treasury. MK earned a master's degree in journalism in the Science, Health and Environmental Reporting (SHERP) from New York University.