Dear Lucas,
I wanted to give you an update on the fight to get a hospital for our community.
First, here is a short documentary on our Rally from October 17th http://vimeo.com/16647159 . Please send around to your friends and circulate widely.
Also, I urge everyone to attend a Joint Public Meeting on the Community Health Needs Assessment that is being held by some of the elected officials and Community Boards 2 and 4. It will be this Monday at 6:30pm at Fulton Center Auditorium, 119 Ninth Avenue. I think this can be an important opportunity as it is the first time the public has been invited to meet with the Needs Assessment Committee to ask important questions and get information regarding this effort by the electeds.
Next mark you calendars - on or around January 20th there will be a Forum sponsored by the Coalition for a New Village Hospital with a panel which will include health care experts and others working on the effort over the past year on the fight for health care on the Lower West Side of Manhattan. This will be a forum for us a community to ask questions, but also for the new administration in Albany to hear from the community and find a way to work together to restore the much needed hospital services at the site of St. Vincent's Hospital as quickly as possible so that we can create jobs, bring in federal monies to our state and our city and most importantly restore health care to lower Manhattan.
Finally, there are a number of myths being bounced around concerning the closing of St. Vincent's Hospital and the efforts of thousands of our fellow community members to restore a hospital at the St. Vincent's site.
We are all susceptible to myths. They offer easy solutions to difficult problems. But we have to be careful.
There is a difference between real solutions and the comfort of myths. If we accept the myths put forward to keep our community in line while a few decide our fate, we could lose.
Let us examine some of these myths:
Myth 1: The Berger Commission made no specific recommendations or findings regarding St. Vincent's Hospital.
Fact 1: The Berger Commission's job was not to make affirmative findings of hospitals to keep open, but to identify any hospitals that could be closed. Not only was St. Vincent's allowed to continue its operations but the Berger Commission did make an affirmative finding that St. Vincent's was "essential".
Myth 2: St. Vincent's had accumulated over $1 billion of debt because of the costs of health care and that is why it was forced to close the hospital operations at West 12th Street implying that St. Vincent's was economically unfeasible.
Fact 2: As we now know, the overwhelming majority of this alleged debt was not accrued by the running of St. Vincent's hospital, but was transferred to St. Vincent's from other institutions.
Myth 3: Section 2806 of the NYS Public Health Law does not apply to the closure of St. Vincent's Hospital and therefore the hospital closed properly.
Fact 3: The closure of St. Vincent's Hospital violated Title 10 Section 401.3 of the New York Codes, Rules and Regulations, The Municipal Laws and Open Meeting Laws, the New York State Constitution and Section 2806 of the NYS Public Health Law. Title 10 states in pertinent part that St. Vincent's was required to tender to the DOH a closure plan that provided for a continuation of services and a safekeeping of records and that the DOH was required to ensure, approve, and transmit this approval in writing to St. Vincent's before allowing such closure to begin. This was not done. The services provided by St. Vincent's were terminated not because of St. Vincent's debt, but because the DOH refused to allow Mt. Sinai to take over these operations. As such the DOH created a constructive revocation of the Certificate of Operations and Section 2806 Paragraph 6 applies. This paragraph says that the commissioner may suspend, limit, modify or revoke a Certificate of Operation only "after taking into consideration the total number of beds necessary to meet the public need" and complying with the other obligations outlined in the law to include the public in this determination.
Section 2806 of the NYS Public Health Law is in place to protect the public from closures by the DOH which jeopardize proper resources for public health care. It addresses closures in which the Certificate of Operation is terminated without the normal procedure outlined in Title 10 which by the DOH's own admission includes this closure.
Myth 4: City zoning cannot be used to stop residential or commercial development to replace a hospital at the site of St. Vincent's. And even if it could, these zoning changes are up to the Bankruptcy Court.
Fact 4: Community Board 2 acting properly, passed a valid resolution that denounced the use of St. Vincent's site for anything other than a hospital. The resolution called for the elected officials involved in the ULURP process to prohibit changing the current zoning to residential or commercial use. What do we do when our elected officials continue to ignore and deride this clear directive from the community?
Further, the Coalition emphatically disagrees with the idea that the federal bankruptcy court can decide New York City zoning law. It can't.
Myth 5: Federal funds are not available for a hospital and we cannot afford to open a new hospital
Fact 5: When St. Vincent's closed it had hundreds of millions of dollars of US Department of Defense open contracts. The hospital received hundreds of millions of dollars of federal monies which are now lost to the City and to the State. The sooner we restore a hospital, the sooner we can recover these revenue streams and replace thousands of jobs in the community. The fastest and most affordable way to do this is to simply renovate and restore the services at the site of the old St. Vincent's.
Instead of trying to talk the residents of the lower west side into accepting some kind of health facility that is not a hospital, or telling us we should not continue to demand a hospital in the most direct and expedient way possible let us come together as a community. What we need is a commitment by the elected officials of our community to ensure that nothing less than a full-fledged hospital will be acceptable as a replacement at the St. Vincent's site immediately.
Eileen Dunn, RN
Angela Jones
David Kaufman, MD
Yetta Kurland, Esq. (pictured above)
Paul Newell, District Leader
Thomas D. Shanahan, Esq.
Steering Committee
Coalition for a New Village Hospital