Human Cost of Hospital Closings
As demonstrators rally in Syracuse, and others walk from Buffalo to Albany, to protest the hospital-closing recommendations of the Berger Commission, the folks at the Opportunity Agenda, working with a number of partner organizations, bring us this Google Maps mash-up showing how the closings would disproportionately affect low-income and minority communities here in NYC.
The problem, as Joshua Brustein at the invaluable Gotham Gazette puts it, is New York's "Twin Crises in Health Care:" fragile finances and lack of access to care. On the one hand, hospitals all over the state are facing bankruptcy - as care is increasingly outsourced to clinics and average hospital stays decline in length, hospitals in the state have lost $2.4 billion since 1998. The solution recommended by the Berger Commission is, among other things, to close some of those hospitals, reducing the "glut" of beds and improving the finances of other hospitals that will pick up business from those that have been shut.
However, as the Opportunity Agenda has made clear, this approach will only worsen New York's other health crisis: a scandalous lack of access to health care, which most brutally affects poor and nonwhite communities (full report here [pdf]).
The Commission's plan became law when neither Pataki nor the outgoing Legislature rejected it at the end of last year's session. However, it will be subject to legal challenges and further political wrangling, and meanwhile Governor Spitzer will be forced to confront the possibility of having to recommend further closings - not to mention the massive challenge presented by the state's spiraling Medicaid costs.
As New Yorkers, like the rest of America, continue to pay the price for the lack of a rational national health care system, we'll have to be aware of how our attempts to deal with the fiscal crisis in health care could end up deepening the human crisis.
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Health | Hospitals | Race | New York | New York City
Good question
Submitted by Paul Curtis on 17 January 2007 - 6:45pm.
I'm very much a single-payer guy myself, though I would of course prefer to see a national solution. States are addressing the health care crisis in patchwork - and so far always inadquate - ways because the federal government has refused to do so, and so the states are forced to.
So yes, I'd like to see single-payer on the agenda, though for the political energy we'd have to expend to get in NY State, I wonder if we shouldn't just concentrate on trying to get it nationally.
I'm not the first person to observe that the defining domestic political battle of our generation may be the one we'll have to wage against the insurance industry.
Where do you think progressive activists
should go from here? Lower income neighborhoods in NY were substantially harned by the Berger Commission. While the key players had assented to the closings before they were announced, the affected community residents were effectively locked out of the process. As I understand them, the Spitzer health care proposals are intended to maintain the expensive private insurance patch-work system now in place. Do you see room for a NY comprehensive, universal single-payer plan? Such a plan would be cost-effective, would bring the cost of employer-provided health insurance under some control (and thus make unionized employers more competitive with non-unionized shops.) Myself, I favor that idea, but do not see it on the agenda. Soem things dont feel different after day one and health insurance seems to me to be one of them. But who knows?