Swansenreport

The federal government is suing the same company Wisconsin just hired to manage a $1.4 billion Medicaid program that helps elderly residents and people with disabilities — including those in Bayfield County — stay in their homes rather than nursing facilities.

On June 16, the U.S. Department of Justice filed a civil lawsuit against Public Partnerships LLC, known as PPL, and the New York State Department of Health over an alleged fraud scheme tied to New York’s home care program for Medicaid patients. Wisconsin’s Department of Health Services selected PPL in January to become the sole fiscal agent for the state’s IRIS program — Include, Respect, I Self-Direct — which serves roughly 30,000 Wisconsinites and is available to residents of Bayfield and Ashland counties.

IRIS gives adults with disabilities and frail elderly residents control over their own care. Participants hire and manage their own caregivers. The fiscal agent — the role PPL is set to take over — processes payroll, handles taxes, and manages the financial plumbing that keeps caregivers paid and participants living at home.

Federal prosecutors say PPL is doing something very different in New York. The DOJ alleges the company secured that state’s similar contract through a sham bid process, then quietly abandoned the financial limits written into the agreement — pocketing unauthorized profits from federal Medicaid funds while New York failed to stop it. Patients there have faced delayed caregiver payments and disrupted services since PPL took over in 2025.

Wisconsin hasn’t handed PPL the keys yet. DHS says the transition won’t begin before 2027, and current IRIS fiscal agents remain in place in the meantime. But the timing of the federal lawsuit — less than five months after Wisconsin announced its intent to award the contract — is raising pointed questions at the State Capitol about whether the selection process was thorough enough.

Missouri pulled a PPL contract earlier this year. The MacIver Institute, a conservative Wisconsin policy group that has been scrutinizing the PPL selection since January, reported this week that Missouri revoked a PPL deal after finding problems with how the company represented itself in its proposal — language similar to what federal prosecutors are now calling artificially attractive bidding in New York.

New York officials are pushing back hard. A state health department spokesperson called the DOJ lawsuit a political attack by Washington Republicans and cited an appellate court ruling from last fall that upheld PPL’s contract. The department also says the consolidation has saved more than a billion dollars in its first year.

That defense carries some weight. The DOJ complaint is civil, not criminal. The allegations remain unproven. PPL still holds its New York contract, and Wisconsin DHS maintains it ran a legitimate competitive bid process in which PPL earned the highest score among all applicants.

The Swansen Report reached out to DHS for comment. The department did not respond before publication.

For IRIS participants in Bayfield County, that silence is its own kind of answer. Geography already makes home care harder to deliver up here. Caregivers are hard to recruit and harder to keep. A delayed check to a home care worker is a missed shift. And for someone who cannot safely live alone without help, a missed shift isn’t an inconvenience. It’s a crisis.

Sources: U.S. Department of Justice press release, June 16, 2026 | Wisconsin DHS IRIS FEA Announcement | MacIver Institute, June 2026 | New York State Department of Health statement via The Hill and WGRZ