With Washington’s none-too-soon approval of $8 billion in extra Medicaid money for New York, Gov. Cuomo must get busy trimming fat from the state’s bloated hospital system.
Say goodbye to Long Island College Hospital. Bid adieu to Interfaith Medical Center.
If Cuomo follows through on his commitments to the feds, these and other floundering institutions will cease to exist in their current forms and be replaced with non-hospital facilities — such as outpatient clinics and urgent-care centers — that are better suited to New York’s health needs in the 21st century.
Contrary to alarmist rhetoric from Mayor de Blasio and others, this will be a good thing if done correctly.
Cuomo administration Medicaid reforms are projected to save the federal government an estimated $17 billion over the next five years. The feds are returning part of those savings — on the condition that New York uses the money to improve care and further streamline the system.
Ridding the state of excess hospital capacity was always a central goal of this so-called Medicaid waiver — though the governor got troublingly foggy about that in the lobbying he directed at U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius.
Upping the pressure on her to approve a big check, Cuomo framed the cash infusion as necessary to “protect” Brooklyn hospitals such as LICH and Interfaith. He made the pitch sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with de Blasio, who has a history of grandstandingly opposing any and all hospital closures.
Now that Sebelius has given the okay, Cuomo is speaking in clearer and smarter terms.
“This is about transforming hospitals that are financially unsustainable because they have beds that are unneeded,” Cuomo said Friday.
By converting underused hospital space to primary-care clinics and outpatient treatment centers, he added, the state aims to reduce unnecessary hospitalization by a hefty 25% during the five-year term of the Medicaid grant.
“Will it mean that some hospital beds are reduced? Yes, because that’s the point of the exercise,” said Cuomo. “So you will have a reduction in hospital beds. You will have a better health-care system for people, however.”
In contrast to Cuomo’s straight talk, de Blasio used his budget presentation Wednesday to dramatically read the names of 17 hospitals or hospital branches that have closed over the past 12 years. He called it a “shocking number” and “an epidemic” — words designed to stoke fear.
Left out of his recitation was a frank acknowledgement of why the closures happened: (a) because extended hospital stays are thankfully a smaller part of medical care than they once were and (b) because the declining number of people who do need hospitalization now have lots of top-notch choices in the five boroughs, and chose to take their business elsewhere.
LICH is a prime example. It had lost money for years before it was taken over by SUNY Downstate Medical Center, and has continued to lose money since.
Several developers have stepped forward with plans to close the hospital and redevelop the property as a mixture of clinics and medical services, including an urgent-care center, plus apartments or condos.
But lawsuits — including one by de Blasio in his former role as the city’s public advocate — have stymied any sale and forced SUNY to keep LICH limping along at a ruinous cost to taxpayers of $13 million a month.
The place is too far gone to be a candidate for Medicaid waiver money, as Cuomo made clear on Friday.
He and SUNY are trying to do right by LICH and other struggling hospitals, for the good of public health and taxpayers’ wallets. De Blasio should do the same — or at least get out of the way.
