There are 64 Medicaid-funded social adult daycare centers packed into a single one-mile radius of Flushing, Queens. Not 64 in the borough. Not 64 in the city. Sixty-four within walking distance of each other, according to a new CBS News data analysis that found the densest cluster of such facilities anywhere in the country. Federal investigators have noticed, and they are asking the question any taxpayer with a pulse would ask.
“[It] begs the question: How many social adult daycare centers do you need?” said Dr. Mehmet Oz, administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, in the CBS report.
The answer, if the billing records are to be believed, is that Flushing needs enough capacity to serve more than 90 percent of every Medicaid-eligible senior in the neighborhood. That is what these facilities collectively bill for.
Think about what that number implies. Nine out of every ten poor seniors in one Queens neighborhood are supposedly showing up for taxpayer-funded meals, activities, and personal care. Either Flushing is home to the most socially active elderly population in American history, or a great many of those seniors exist primarily as line items on a claim form.
The trend line makes the honest explanation even harder to sustain. From 2018 to 2024, the neighborhood’s Medicaid-eligible senior population grew about 20 percent, right in line with the rest of the country. The number of seniors billed by its adult daycares grew 390 percent over the same period. Statewide, New York’s taxpayer bill for these facilities nearly quadrupled. Medicaid paid adult daycare providers $3.35 billion nationwide in 2024, and 17 percent of it flowed to New York’s 375 facilities, more than any other state in the union.