Last week, we brought you a live, exclusive interview with Maria Perrin, the president of Public Partnerships LLC, or PPL, the company now in charge of New York’s Consumer Directed Personal Assistance program, or CDPAP. In this interview - we were able to ask some of your most pressing questions about how the state’s move from 600 companies administering the program, to only one, will impact our community.
During this interview, Maria Perrin announced a few developments in how PPL will handle CDPAP going forward. She committed to looking at potential changes to how the wage parity is handled downstate. The transition led to some downstate personal assistants having the wage parity provided in their counties going from being used towards enhancing their pay to being used to auto-enroll them in a wellness plan from PPL. She also committed to looking into issues with access to medical exams for rural PAs. But most notably, she announced that bank cards will become available in the next 60 days, which may alleviate some issues with payment.
TRANSCRIPT
This episode has excerpts from a Disabilities Beat Live event that aired on April 30, 2025. You can listen to the entire episode or read the full transcript by clicking here.
This is a rush transcript provided by a contractor and may be updated over time to be more accurate.
Emyle Watkins: Hi, I’m Emyle Watkins, and this is the Disabilities Beat.
Last week, we brought you a live, exclusive interview with Maria Perrin, the president of Public Partnerships LLC, or PPL, the company now in charge of New York’s Consumer Directed Personal Assistance program, or CDPAP.
During this interview, Maria Perrin announced a few developments in how PPL will handle CDPAP going forward. She committed to looking at potential changes to how the wage parity is handled downstate. The transition led to some downstate personal assistants having the wage parity provided in their counties going from being used towards enhancing their pay to being used to auto-enroll them in a wellness plan from PPL. She also committed to looking into issues with access to medical exams for rural PAs.
But most notably, she announced that bank cards will become available in the next 60 days, which may alleviate some issues with payment.
We’ve pulled together those three sections of our interview - but you can check out the full interview on our website at BTPM.org, including a transcript and ASL interpretation.
Emyle Watkins: Many people also wrote into us to ask if PPL has any sort of opt-out for this downstate benefits plan or if PPL will consider adding an opt-out so they instead can take the wage parity as a wage increase and purchase health insurance on their own. Can you speak to that?
Maria Perrin: Yeah, so the Wellness Plan does not keep you from getting any other benefits such as Medicaid or other government healthcare programs except for Medicare. It becomes a primary, so you can opt out of the Wellness Plan if you have Medicare.
Emyle Watkins: But I think people are asking that because they'd like, instead of their money from their wage going to these benefits, they would instead just like to receive that money as part of their wage.
Maria Perrin: We'll definitely consider it. I can't give you an answer today because all of these were designed for providing a comprehensive and professional package to people, which also includes things like personal time off and holiday pay and things of that nature. So it was developed to really professionalize the personal assistant compensation package. But certainly we'll be happy to take it back and consider the options.
Emyle Watkins: I'm wondering how did PPL decide to contract with Mobile Health and are you working on any exam alternatives for rural workers who maybe can't make that two to three hour drive?
Maria Perrin: Yeah, so we selected Mobile Health because they are the largest provider of these such health assessment services. So they had the most coverage of all of the providers who we looked at any providers serving the state of New York, they currently had been serving CDPAP PAs. So they were a good fit from that standpoint in terms of they have the most locations, they were the largest and they have experience with the population, so that's how we chose them.
Secondly, happy to go back and look at are there any points where they should have more coverage and talking with Mobile Health to offer some options for people so that the hours that they need to drive, the time they need to drive is shortened for when they do their health assessment.
And then lastly I would say is in case people don't know if you are already a personal assistant in the program and you have done your health assessment in the past year, you don't need to get another one until your health assessment becomes due again. So I just want to make sure people have that information as well.
Emyle Watkins: Many PAs had bank cards from some of their FIs. So some of the larger FIs, I believe including FreedomCare had provided debit cards essentially to PAs who were unbanked. And it's not uncommon for someone to be without a bank. And so I guess I'm wondering, and this is a question we receive several times, is does PPL have any plans to provide a bank card or some sort of option for unbanked people?
Maria Perrin: We do. So we have heard from certain PAs that they want a bank card and we are working on that option now and it will be available within the next 60 days.
Emyle Watkins: You can listen to the Disabilities Beat segment on demand, view a transcript and plain language description for every episode on our website at BTPM.org. I'm Emily Watkins. Thanks for listening.
