Adult Day Care Donors Poured Cash Into Hochul Race

Questions about those businesses remain. Zhang listed himself as the owner and manager of Bao Kang on campaign disclosure forms, but local and federal Medicaid records name other people as the owners. He also owns Confucius Social Daycare Center in Manhattan’s Chinatown, which billed Medicaid $15.7 million between 2018 and 2024, along with Silver Arch Management and AA Plus Management Inc., a point-of-service Medicaid provider that has billed taxpayers $2.65 million.

Neither the adult day care centers nor Zhang or Shang have been accused of wrongdoing, and Shang did not respond to repeated attempts to reach him for comment. Still, the disclosure records and billing figures raise a familiar issue in New York: how an industry built around senior services, public money, and neighborhood politics can become hard to separate from campaign fundraising. Zhang himself was quoted in a 2022 Chinese-language report warning against greed and excess in the community while praising New York State’s generosity in home care, day care and medical assistance.

That same year, the Baxter Street building in Manhattan’s Chinatown that Zhang lists as his business address housed another donor center, Cathay Adult Daycare, which gave Hochul $5,000 and billed Medicaid $8.4 million. Other centers that donated to Hochul in 2022 included American Adult Daycare Center, Big Apple Adult Daycare, Blue Sky Adult Daycare, Greater New York Social and Health Adult Daycare, and Brooklyn’s Jy Adult Social Daycare, each with $5,000 checks.

The controversy matters because Medicaid dollars are supposed to support care for seniors and vulnerable New Yorkers, not pad empty facilities or political machines. New York’s Health Department told CBS News it has referred 387 social adult daycare centers for investigation since 2021, with about a third sent to the attorney general for legal action. Gov. Hochul’s office says she has pushed to root out waste, fraud and abuse and that political contributions do not affect state decisions. The next question is whether regulators will tighten scrutiny on the centers that now sit at the center of both campaign money and Medicaid billing. For American readers, this is another warning that public health programs can be exploited when watchdogs fail to keep pace.