Hospitals Worried By Report

Panic is setting in among New York’s money-hemorrhaging hospitals as Governor Pataki’s health care commission nears completion of a first draft of proposals for revamping the state’s troubled health industry.

Late next week, commission members are set to receive confidential advisory reports that will likely include lists of hospitals and nursing homes marked for downsizing or closure. Although the reports are nonbinding, they represent the first time the commission is formally considering recommendations and are the object of intense speculation and fear in the industry.

“If you’re on this preliminary list, it’s going to be hard to turn this around,” the director of government affairs for the Business Council of New York State in Albany Elliott Shaw, who specializes in health care policy, said.

Representatives of some of the most vulnerable hospitals in the city said yesterday they did not know of the contents of the preliminary proposals, which the commission is aiming to keep under tight wraps until its deadline of December 1, when it is supposed to submit its final report to Mr. Pataki in the last days of his governorship.

There are growing signs that hospital executives are girding for a massive public relations battle — along the lines of the protests that greeted Mayor Bloomberg’s firehouse closings in 2003 — that will grow with intensity in coming weeks and draw into the debate city leaders, state lawmakers, and the front-runner in the governor’s race, Attorney General Eliot Spitzer.

In preparation for worst-case scenarios, hospitals are quietly retaining lobbying and public relations firms and reaching out to local lawmakers for support, according to advisers to the commission.

We can no longer afford hospitals that are fully staffed from highly paid executives all the way down to janitors. Hospitals if privately run would have consolidated. When only 40% of beds are full how can we keep 100% staffing.

Emergency rooms cannot be continually used for walk in Doctors offices, that is why we have clinics and Doctors offices. This is a tough step but a needed one.