Obama as hospital savior? Maybe not

From the Daily News:

In a move expected to save three struggling Brooklyn hospitals, the Obama administration has finally agreed to let the state reinvest $8 billion in Medicaid savings into its health care system, Gov. Cuomo said Thursday.

Cuomo has repeatedly warned that without the approval, Brookdale Hospital, Interfaith Medical Center and Wyckoff Heights Medical Center would soon shut down.

U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius told Cuomo Thursday that the feds are ready to sign off on the request.

The $8 billion is $2 billion less than the state had sought, but it’s enough to help remake the health care system, Cuomo said.

However Crains has this to say:

Disregard the political rhetoric prior to this week's tentative approval by federal health officials of an $8 billion grant to overhaul New York state's health care system.

The so-called Medicaid waiver is not going to prevent every struggling Brooklyn hospital from closing, let alone any specific hospital. It won't keep New York City's public health system in the black.

And the waiver has nothing to do with New York's insurance exchange created under Obamacare, a connection that Gov. Andrew Cuomo publicly made as he pushed Washington to approve the cash infusion he had sought for 19 months.

For the average New Yorker, the $8 billion grant will actually chip away at the beloved hospitals so many community groups have battled to protect in recent years. The blunt reality of the new federal funding is that community hospitals throughout the city will lose beds. Many will be a sliver of their former selves, and newly anchored to big health care delivery systems. Access to more complex medical services will require travel to another neighborhood—or another borough.

In truth, what the $8 billion in federal money will fund can't be explained in a soundbite. That is because most of it will be funneled through the complex federal Delivery System Reform Incentive Payment program, or DSRIP, embedded in similar waivers that Washington approved for New Jersey, California and Texas. The program is meant to stabilize the health care safety-net system and to cut avoidable hospitalizations and emergency-department use by 25% over the next five years.

State intervenes to aid ailing hospital

From CBS New York:

Days after an announcement that Interfaith Medical Center in Brooklyn would be closing, New York State gave the hospital a reprieve by committing to funding until March of next year.

As WCBS 880′s Monica Miller reported Monday night, the state agreed to fund the hospital in Bedford-Stuyvesant through March 7, according to a news release. In the meantime, state and local officials, community groups and unions have been working to secure permanent federal funding to keep the hospital open.

The hospital is now in bankruptcy proceedings.

On Friday, a hospital representative said in multiple published reports that a U.S. Bankruptcy Court judge was expected to issue an order Monday announcing that the hospital was closing.

Mediation between hospital officials and creditors, unions and other parties began in November in an attempt to prevent the hospital from closing, according to published reports. But the mediation ended on Friday without any resolution, published reports said.

Kevin Finnegan, director for the Service Employees International Union Local 1199 Healthcare Workers East, expressed gratitude that the state stepped in.