Cuomo “first governor we haven’t gotten into a fight with in a long time,” said Kevin Finnegan. http://t.co/XsqYPbIMaw @1199SEIU #saveLICH
— Louis Flores (@maslowsneeds) September 2, 2014The corrupt political mercenaries running unions lead rank and file astray. 1199's Finnegan is Cuomo's lackey. @HammerDaily
— Louis Flores (@maslowsneeds) September 2, 2014
Mayor de Blasio has gone back on his campaign promise to support "hospitals, not condos." And the governor, well, Gov. Cuomo has been trying to close Brooklyn hospitals from Day One.
| RELATED | Disappointment in Mayor Bill de Blasio is turning into community outrage as residents of Brooklyn come to grips with how the mayor's office waged a duplicitous campaign in regards to Long Island College Hospital, or LICH as it is better known. Publicly, Mayor de Blasio was giving lip service to saving LICH, but privately, some community activists are now saying that the mayor's staff was trying to bully healthcare activists into supporting the closure of the hospital so that a large real estate developer could convert the complex medical campus into luxury condos. The reality of the mayor's duplicitious nature, while shocking to grassroots activists, comes as no surprise to astute political observers of how the real corrupt nature of the broken political system works in New York City. Mayor de Blasio stormed into office during last year's mayoral election with the aid of a corrupt Super PAC undercuting his chief rival and with promises to provide a clean break from the Bloomberg-Quinn administration. The mayor's empty and meaningless campaign promises weren't made, because he believed in them, but because his campaign consultants knew that the electorate was desperate for change, and that this messaging would help him win the election -- a prediction that turned out to be correct, but that would not fix the broken political system, because that was never the de Blasio campaign's intention. The latest revelation of the mayor's duplicitous administration comes from an article about LICH in The Brooklyn Daily Eagle :
While campaigning on the theme of "hospitals, not condos," De Blasio has apparently moderated his stance since becoming Mayor, saying that an urgent care center and "stand-alone ER" planned for the site will preserve health care for northwestern Brooklyn. Sources told the Brooklyn Eagle that in February the Mayor's staff put pressure on the community groups fighting for LICH to support Fortis. The growing political scandal over Mayor de Blasio's betrayal of his campaign promise to save LICH is just the latest example of how the economic realities will fracture Democratic unity : On the city level, nobody knows how the mayor will pay for expansion of pre-kinder, making good on union backpay demands, and fighting income inequality. On the state level, Gov. Andrew Cuomo will use pension IOU vouchers and hospital closings to pay for the $2 billion election year tax cut gimmicks needed to fluff his troubled re-election campaign. Caught in between are healthcare and other social needs reform activists, who are looking to the twin Democratic politicians of New York, asking, "Where's the liberal leadership we can count on ?" But this fracturing of Democratic unity is only coming about because of how Mayor de Blasio and Gov. Cuomo have deceived voters into believing that the Democratic political elite can deliver an overhaul of the broken political system that never answers the demands made by communitys. The elite Democratic politicians will never deliver social, economic, or legal reforms when they are as beholdened to real estate developers as are Mayor de Blasio and Gov. Cuomo. One of Gov. Cuomo's first acts in office was to empanel a controversial Medicaid Redesign Team that has instituted a scorched earth campaign of austerity cuts to the poorest New Yorkers, those who rely on Medicaid for their healthcare. Part of the governor's austerity cuts was to push for the closure of full service hospitals, where the poor and the uninsured seek life-saving, but expensive, healthcare services. His controversial push for more hospital closings came on the heels of the controversial closure of St. Vincent's Hospital in Manhattan, which is being now redeveloped into a $1 billion luxury condo and townhouse complex by the billionaire Rudin family. Because of income and wealth disparities, many of the state's poor people are concentrated in New York City, making it an easy target to close hospitals with a charity mission serving the poor and the uninsured. The governor's plan to cut healthcare costs to the poor was expanded under Obamacare, as more and more poor people qualified for Medicaid, a move that forced Gov. Cuomo to close even more charity hospitals. To augment hospital closings, the Obamacare expansion of the New York State Medicaid program makes it difficult for poor people to receive prescriptions for life-saving, but expensive, prescription medications, like cholesterol-fighting medications and other prescription medications for people with long-term diseases or disorders, like irritable bowel syndrome or other functional gastro-intestinal disorders. Against this backdrop of austerity cuts, the closure of LICH on Mayor de Blasio's and Gov. Cuomo's joint watch is opening the eyes of healthcare activists to the unseemly political reality that Demcoratic politicians, even those that self-annoint themselves as "progressives," are just as neoliberal in their need to make austerity cuts to the poor and to the sick as the former center-right administration of Michael Bloomberg and former New York City Council Speaker Christine Quinn. Furthermore, if Mayor Bill de Blasio was uncommitted to saving LICH from the start, in spite of his campaign demands for a moratorium on hospital closings, then this doesn't bode well for Interfaith Medical Center, also in Brooklyn, which has been targeted for closure, as well, by Medicaid Redesign Team hatchetman Stephen Berger and Gov. Cuomo. Even as the 1199 healthcare union protests the job losses and healthcare cuts by corporate-minded CEO's, note that 1199 strong-armed the Working Families Party to endorse the re-election campaign of Gov. Cuomo, whose very own Medicaid Redesign Team implimented large-scale healthcare cuts, including the outsourcing to Mr. Berger the effort to keep closing city hospitals that have resulted in still yet further healthcare union job losses, not including the negative impact to public health. How long will it take healthcare activists and other grassroots advocates fighting for unfinished healthcare reforms, such as the adoption of a single-payer healthcare system in New York state to replace Obamacare, before they wake up to see how the corrupt political operatives of some healthcare unions, drunk on the corrupt political Kool-Aid of "business as usual," keep neoliberal Democratic politicians in office, who have no intentions of ever delivering the healthcare reforms that the community demands ? |
How did Stephen Berger get away with closing so many hospitals? The story begins like this ....
An excerpt from Chapter 9 of Roots of Betrayal : The Ethics of Christine Quinn, available now for a free preview on Scribd :
The hospital closings called for by the Berger Commission were formulated at a time when only some hospital patients were covered by job-based health insurance, and hospitals were forced to write down the economic costs from treating underinsured and uninsured patients. The Berger Commission, headed by a Wall Street banker, Stephen Berger, was only capable of seeing the provision of full-service hospital care from perspective of profits, losses, and debts, instead of from the perspective of providing people with the human right to healthcare. “We have a history in this state of pumping money into the system and not letting hospitals close even if they should,” Mr. Berger told The New York Times, adding, “You have to right-size the system, you have to shrink it, that is No. 1.” In typical Wall Street fashion of divorcing any moral dilemma from situational ethics, hospital closings were pushed as inevitable, and patients were expected to have to deal with it. This was about a decade before "Obamacare" would extend healthcare coverage to millions of uninsured Americans. Back then, Mr. Berger observed overcapacity among hospitals, which had to be cut. However, in the future, Mr. Berger’s draconian cuts would prove to gut healthcare infrastructure leading up to the time when Obamacare would lead to a large influx of newly covered healthcare patients. But even without knowing that healthcare coverage would be expanded within the next decade, back then healthcare advocates knew about the dangers of past outbreaks, pandemics, and unforeseen uses of bioterrorism agents, such as anthrax. There were reasons why it was penny wise and dollar foolish to make drastic cuts to full-service hospital capacity in New York City.
One healthcare union, 1199/S.E.I.U., had to scramble to deal with the fallout over job losses from the impending hospital closings. Jennifer Cunningham, who at that time worked as a spokesperson and political operative for 1199 and would later go on to work for Christine as a political campaign consultant, was more concerned at the time about employee retraining and not about the interruption of patient-centered care. The hit list of hospitals that would be targeted for closure by the Berger Commission came to be known as the Berger Commission Report, and Christine, as chair of the City Council Health Committee, was largely absent from the initial public conversation in 2004 and 2005 around Mr. Berger’s recommendation for hospital closings. Taking her cue from former Speaker Gifford Miller’s precedent of maintaining silence on the controversial West Side Stadium until the project’s outcome was clear, Christine was not visible in the resistance movement to fight the Berger Commission Report’s recommendations until very late in 2006, when the City Council issued its own report just weeks before the Berger Commission Report’s final recommendations would go into effect on January 1, 2007.
Read more : Roots of Betrayal : The Ethics of Christine Quinn, available now for a free preview on Scribd.
SUNY officials order police to arrest activists trying to save LICH from closure.
DeBlasio also marched out in cuffs with a bunch of media following. #savelich pic.twitter.com/aLWH8rB3Z9
— Sarah Jaffe (@sarahljaffe) July 10, 2013
New York City public advocate Bill de Blasio was led away in handcuffs after reports that a peaceful demonstration to save Long Island College Hospital from closing turned into an act of civil disobedience.
.@BilldeBlasio being placed under arrest. Put in the back of police van. pic.twitter.com/PbleLR3hbJ
— Erin Durkin (@erinmdurkin) July 10, 2013
A demonstration had been scheduled Wednesday morning to apply political pressure on SUNY management officials. SUNY will decide whether LICH remains open or is closed as part of Gov. Andrew Cuomo's radical healthcare cuts to window dress the New York State budget in advance of his expected bid for the 2016 presidential race.
Healthcare activists, hospital employees, and healthcare union officials have been trying for months to appeal for help from politicians from Albany to City Hall, but the state legislative session ended last month with no rescue package, and locally Mayor Michael Bloomberg and New York City Council Speaker Christine Quinn concluded next years budget negotiations without making any provision to save LICH from closure.
In the last few weeks, activists had been holding many demonstrations, rallies, and other acts of protest to draw attention to the plight of Brooklyn hospitals. Since 2006, ten New York City hospitals have either closed or downsized, and the remaining hospitals are over-burnded. Wait times at emergency rooms are escalating, and patients in life-or-death situations are having to take longer and longer ambulance rides to get to the next nearest emergency room. To make matters worse, Gov. Cuomo empaneled a group called the Medicaid Redesign Team to identify three more hospitals to close in Brooklyn.
On Feb. 8, 2011, four community activists were arrested in an act of civil disobedience to save St. Vincent's Hospital, but the community received no support from Speaker Quinn. At a rally outside of Gov. Cuomo's office on Monday, Mr. de Blasio accused Mayor Bloomberg of just walking away from the community after St. Vincent's Hospital closed. St. Vincent's activists don't remember Mr. de Blasio being involved in the herculean effort to first save St. Vincent's and then to later preserve the hospital infrastructure for a replacement hospital. But pressure politics from this year's mayoral campaign season has finally pushed him to take bold action. Many St. Vincent's activists noted that it was about time that Mr. de Blasio took action, after all, he is the city's Public Advocate.
Speaker Quinn accepted $30,000 in campaign donations from Rudin Management Company before she approved the billion-dollar Rudin condo conversion plan for St. Vincent's Hospital.
The Rev. Jesse Jackson attends an #OccupyWallStreet meeting of the Healthcare for the 99 per cent. Working Group at Liberty Square (f/k/a Zuccotti Park) in New York City on December 4, 2011.
The civil rights activist Rev. Jesse Jackson joined the regular weekly meeting of the the Healthcare for the 99 per cent. Working Group of #OccupyWallStreet in New York last Sunday.
At the meeting, the Rev. Jackson spoke about the "exorbitant, exploitative cost of medicine." The Rev. Jackson also spoke about how the issue of healthcare access and affordability has motivated many of the hundreds of thousands of members of the 1199SEIU union to want to become part of the #OccupyWallStreet movement.
The Rev. Jackson discussed how many of the "victims" of the broken healthcare system are absent from the #OccupyWallStreet movement, and he said it was the task of the movement to find a way to motivate them to participate.
Other economic issues that the Rev. Jackson said that the disenfranchised faced were incarceration, joblessness, home foreclosures, and high amounts of student loan and credit card debt. The Rev. Jackson asked members of the working group to consider whether the disenfranchised "occupied" where they are, or whether the disenfranchised needed a physical location in order to occupy. "Is occupy a place or a space ?" The Rev. Jackson made the point that location did not define the new social movement's constituents. He added, "Those are you patients and your friends."
One day after the Rev. Jackson attended a Liberty Square meeting of the Healthcare for the 99 per cent. Working Group, the Rev. Jackson published an op-ed in the Chicago Sun-Times entitled, "Cost of broken health care system is killing us."
