Credit: Getty Images.

Julie Farrar is as scared as she’s ever been. That’s saying something when you’ve spent all of your 56 years with sacral agenesis, which means she was born without a fully formed spine.

She gets around in a wheelchair because the disease has paralyzed her legs.

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The Colonie resident is among the nearly 300,000 New Yorkers who benefited from CDPAP, the Consumer Directed Personal Assistance Program. Under its rules, she can hire and manage her own home care workers. The program’s aim is to keep people out of nursing homes.

Enrollment — and costs — have skyrocketed in the past 10 years, corresponding to the growing number of elderly New Yorkers who also use the program. There have been concerns about fraud and lack of oversight among some of the 400 or so brokers who coordinate home aides’ payment through Medicaid.

So Gov. Kathy Hochul and Democrats in the state Legislature ordered a transition to a unified system, overseen by just one for-profit company. It might save costs and make one powerful labor union very happy.

But people like Farrar say they are caught up in what even proponents of the change admit is a rocky transition — too tough for users to sign up, too tough for participants to secure care before a looming deadline, and too tough for some workers to get initial paychecks.

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And it’s........

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