Public Employee Press

HHC avoids Pataki’s knife

By ALFREDO ALVARADO

After months of speculation over the threat of severe cuts and possible closings of HHC facilities, DC 37 hospital workers can now breathe easy.

Gov. George Pataki’s Commission on Health Care Facilities in the 21st Century finally released its long awaited report at a packed news conference Nov. 28 and officially confirmed that no Health and Hospitals Corp. hospitals or clinics are scheduled to be closed.

Commission Chair Stephen Berger, who was the director of the Emergency Financial Control Board during the city’s brush with bankruptcy in the mid-1970s, described the HHC hospitals as “essential institutions” at the news conference.

Hospitals on closing list
However, the commission’s report does recommend the closing of nine private hospitals upstate and five within the metropolitan area as well as mergers of 10 facilities.

The two hospitals in Manhattan targeted by the commission are St. Vincent’s Midtown Hospital and Cabrini Medical Center; also on the hit list are Victory Memorial Hospital in Brooklyn, Westchester Square Medical Center in the Bronx and Parkway Hospital in Queens.

“DC 37 will be monitoring the situation very closely to make sure our public hospitals have adequate resources and personnel to provide quality health care to the additional patients who may turn to nearby HHC hospitals and facilities as a result of these closings,” said DC 37 Executive Director Lillian Roberts.

Key issue: Medicaid rates
DC 37 has also strongly recommended that the commission immediately address the issue of low rates of Medicaid reimbursement. While 39 percent of New York City residents are enrolled in Medicaid, the city only has the capacity to handle 25 percent of the patients.

“For any major public health reform to go forward, an extensive effort to modernize and equalize Medicaid reimbursement is paramount,” the union wrote in a report delivered Dec. 11 at a public hearing of the Community Health Forum.

Under the law that created the hospital review commission, the state Senate and Assembly both have to reject the plan in its entirety by Dec. 31 (after this issue of PEP goes to press) or the recommendations automatically become law; the plan should be carried out by the end of 2007.