From the Daily News:
Four Brooklyn hospitals are in danger of closing within a year unless the state gets help from the feds, Gov. Cuomo warned the Obama administration in a letter this week.
The state still hasn’t heard whether the feds will sign off on a waiver request from last August that would allow New York to use $10 billion of $17.5 billion in Medicaid savings it expects to achieve over the next five years to help restructure the state’s outdated health system for the poor.
Cuomo sent a letter this week to US Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius asking for quick action.
“Due to a rapid deterioration in the financial status of essential components of the health care services system in Brooklyn, if nothing is done within the next 12 months, the outcome will be disastrous,” he wrote.
Without the waiver, he said, at least four hospitals with nearly 1,000 inpatient beds and hundreds of thousands emergency room and ambulatory care visits will be in danger of closing.
Cuomo aides said the four are Long Island College Hospital, Interfaith Medical Center, Brookdale Medical Center, and SUNY Downstate/Brooklyn.
5 comments:
"would allow New York to use $10 billion of $17.5 billion in Medicaid savings it expects"
Spend it before you get it, and what happens when these "savings" turn out to not exist ?
That's it, bring another million to New York.
Isn't Brookdale part of Medisys run by Rosen who also runs the Association of Distressed Hospitals?
Brookdale is no longer part of MediSys and neither is David Rosen.
New York City’s 11 public hospitals are in dire financial straits. City hospital chief Dr. Ram Raju has laid out a plan to put these hospitals on the road to financial wellness, but his scheme is a sugar pill.
Worse, these city-run hospitals aren’t the only ones in critical condition. At least a dozen other hospitals across the five boroughs are floundering financially.
Unlike the city’s public hospitals, refuges for the uninsured, these other facilities have no reason to be kept on life-support with taxpayer dollars.
They’re medical money pits that offer mediocre care and dilapidated facilities. They should be closed or sold to investors who can upgrade them. But politicians and unions stand in the way.
In 2013, mayoral candidate Bill de Blasio mugged for the cameras as he got arrested while protesting the closing of Long Island College Hospital.
LICH was bleeding $13 million a month, but de Blasio, the hospital unions and assorted activists opposed replacing it with a new emergency department operated by NYU Langone.
De Blasio demagogued the issue all the way to an election-night victory, then supported the conversion plan.
brooklyn hospital emergency room
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