Mount Sinai Tells Downtown to Drop Dead

By Arthur Schwartz https://villageview.nyc STATE SENATOR KRISTEN GONZALEZ at a rally for Beth Israel. Photo courtesy of Ian Kwok. Note: The Village View has featured several front page stories about the efforts of the Mount Sinai Health System to shut down Beth Israel Hospital. We believe that thecommunity needs to understand the potential calamity in store and needs to make as much noise as possible to keep it from happening. If Beth Israel closes, we who live south of 23rd Street will have only one hospital left–Downtown Presbyterian, just south of the Brooklyn Bridge. That hospital already sees 130,000 patients a year and has only 170 beds. It doesn’t do heart surgery or any other complex surgeries. Should Beth Israel close, the nearest full-service hospital for anyone below 34th Street will be Bellevue at 29th Street and First Avenue or NYU-Tisch a few blocks north. If you live west of Third Avenue, and you have a serious health issue, such as a heart attack, it could take you at least one half hour to get to Bellevue or NYU. And God forbid we have another pandemic. Beth Israel has 800 beds tucked away, and as of last year, 600 were full. 75,000 people arrived at the emergency room in a non-pandemic year. Where would they go during the next crisis? It is unimaginable. We at Village View keep plugging away on the issue, in part, to pressure Governor Hochul (who ultimately has the power to say “stop”), to support her constituents in Lower Manhattan. In April, the State Department of Health (NYDOH) had, after six months, returned the Beth Israel Closure Plan to its Mount Sinai Hospital owners and said that it was inadequate. Three weeks earlier the DOH had cited Beth Israel for closing a long list of services – illegally – after filing its not-approved closure plan last November, and ordered them to produce a plan to restore services. On March 15, Supreme Court Justice Nicholas Moyne issued a Temporary Restraining Order, in a lawsuit brought by community groups and leaders (this author is lead counsel), prohibiting any more closures and requiring “best efforts” to restore services. We thought we wouldn’t hear about closure for another 6-9 months, and community leaders met about services they wanted to see restored. But at first subtlety, and then with a sledge hammer, Mount Sinai fought back. It had originally planned to shut Beth Israel by March 31, and almost all of the doctors resigned and made other plans. And though the staff represented by Local 1199 had won the right to be placed elsewhere in the Mount Sinai system, they were told that those jobs might not stay available forever. And to those long-timers who had left, they said “don’t be so sure that you will get another job if you want come back.” Then came the sledge hammer, Mount Sinai presented a new 386 page plan to the DOH, and declared that they were closing July 12. They asserted that all they needed was to give 90 days notice. And, they threw in a new argument: “we lose money at Beth Israel, millions a year. For the government to force us to stay in business is unconstitutional.” They also argued that the lack of doctors made it impossible to stay open past July 12. But there was no serious discussion about bringing doctors back. The new plan was a move from challenging the DOH by illegally closing departments, anticipating DOH being asleep at the wheel, to slapping DOH in the face and saying “we dare you to stop us.” There is still a Temporary Restraining Order and the Court has called everyone in the discuss the situation on May 30 (as we go to press.) In anticipation of that hearing I wrote to Mount Sinai’s lawyers, challenging their lawlessness (Elizabeth Sellman is the CEO of Beth Israel): The document bearing Elizabeth Sellman’s signature implies that all that MSBI had to do under the law was provide 90 days advance notice of a closure, and implies that after 90 days the closure can occur. I know this is the way Mount Sinai treated Beth Israel partial closures prior to 2023. For example, the Maternity Unit was closed 90 days after the CON was filed; it was approved after the Unit closed. Same for Heart Surgery, Pediatric Surgery and Neo-Natal Intensive Care. But when DOH put out its August 29, 2023 Facility Closure Plan, DHDTC DAL#: 23-06, which we will maintain in our Amended Petition is the equivalent of a Regulation, the Department made it clear that this is no longer the case. That Plan states: • 90 days prior notice of the intent to close must be provided to the Department. • prior written approval of the closure plan must be obtained from the Department before the facility is approved to close. • no actions related to the proposed closure, such as discontinuing a service, may be taken prior to receiving approval of the closure plan. The emphasis is mine. The third bullet has been repeatedly ignored by Mount Sinai, and although raised, not enforced by the Department of Health, which has stood idly by (i.e., where is the response to the March 15 Notice of Deficiency?). The third bullet makes it clear that closure cannot occur simply because there was notice. But the Sellman letter repeatedly implies that the hospital could have closed in January, and that even if the updated closure plan starts a new 90 day clock running, the hospital “must close no later than May 23, 2023.”(I believe that she meant August 23rd). The Sellman letter reads as though DHDTC DAL#: 23-06 didn’t change the rules. And just because DOH hasn’t responded by saying “you are wrong,” we will forcefully make that point at the May 30th conference. We are ready to rumble! An analysis by the Community Coalition to save Beth Israel appears here . Joint Statement on Beth Israel Hospital Closing Plan Representative Jerry Nadler, Representative Dan Goldman, Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine, State Senator Kristen Gonzalez, State Senator Brad Hoylman-Sigal, State Senator Liz Krueger, State Senator Brian Kavanagh, Assembly Member Harvey Epstein, Assembly Member Deborah Glick, Assembly Member Grace Lee, Assembly Member Tony Simone, Council Member Carlina Rivera, Council Member Keith Powers, Council Member Christopher Marte, Council Member Erik Bottcher “Our offices have received notice that the Mount Sinai Health System has resubmitted their application to close Beth Israel Hospital on July 12 of this year. This elimination of services on a hasty timeline without adequate community engagement remains unacceptable and we urge the Department of Health to return this application. Mount Sinai must engage in a robust and collaborative process to fulfill its obligations to the community in ensuring access to high quality health care is protected in lower Manhattan.” https://villageview.nyc/2024/06/03/mount-sinai-tells-downtown-to-drop-dead/