Cuomo Pushes Cuts To Safety-Net Hospitals
Cuomo Pushes Cuts To Safety-Net Hospitals After They Stepped Up During Pandemic
When COVID-19 swept through the Rockaway peninsula last spring, St. John’s Episcopal Hospital was alone to weather the storm. Those who live nearby suffer disproportionately from conditions like diabetes, obesity, and hypertension that make people more vulnerable to severe cases of COVID-19, and St. John’s has been the sole medical center serving the isolated beach community since Peninsula Hospital closed in 2012. After the pandemic hit, St. John’s quickly tripled its ICU capacity but was still pushed to its limits as the virus overwhelmed Queens.
“There would literally be 10 to 15 people on stretchers outside in the parking lot, and we basically had to go outside and pick the sickest patients to bring in and treat,” recalled Dr. Teddy Lee, director of the Emergency Department at St. John’s. Lee and his exhausted but determined colleagues were featured in a mini-documentary by the New York Times that looked “Inside One of New York’s Deadliest Zip Codes.”
While the spotlight was on St. John’s pandemic heroics, the hospital was quietly dealing with another crisis behind the scenes. As a safety-net hospital that primarily serves low-income patients, the hospital routinely operates at a loss, relying on subsidies from the state. After Governor Andrew Cuomo’s administration hired consulting firm ToneyKorf Partners in 2019 to develop a plan to make St. John’s financially viable, hospital leaders started to shave $24 million off its annual budget—mostly by laying off managerial staff and cutting support services.
But apparently, it wasn’t enough.
Last month, ToneyKorf consultants presented hospital leaders with three grim options, all of which would shrink St. John’s to a fraction of its former size. Under one proposal, the 257-bed medical center would be stripped down to a 15-bed “micro-hospital” with an emergency room attached.
“Having that kind of model defeats the purpose of trying to serve this community,” said Lee. “Depending on where you live in the Rockaways, it could take over an hour to get to [Mount Sinai] South Nassau or Jamaica or Flushing [hospitals].”
The situation at St. John’s is not unusual. The state Health Department routinely seeks to close, shrink, or merge safety-net hospitals that are losing money, which often reduces the capacity for patients. These strategies are left over from a Pataki-era task force on hospitals known as the Berger Commission, whose policies have contributed to the loss of 20,000 hospital beds across the state over the last 20 years. The result is an uneven distribution of the remaining beds, with about 1.5 per 1,000 people in Queens, compared with 6.4 beds per 1,000 residents of Manhattan. During the pandemic, Queens has experienced more than twice as many COVID-19 deaths as Manhattan.