BY LINCOLN ANDERSON | Bowing to pressure from Mount Sinai, the state Department of Health has granted conditional approval for the health system to close historic Beth Israel Hospital.
According to reports, both D.O.H. and Mount Sinai Health System confirmed the news. The announcement comes hot on the heels of Politico reporting just one week ago about Mount Sinai officials warning of “risks to patient safety” allegedly posed by allowing Beth Israel to keep operating with just a barebones staff.
Mount Sinai had planned to close the Gramercy hospital on July 12. However, a community lawsuit, which remains active, plus D.O.H. not having O.K.’d a revised closure plan delayed things. In connection with the lawsuit, a temporary restraining order, or T.R.O., against the closing remains in effect. Mount Sinai reportedly has asked for “an expedited review” of the litigation.
Mount Sinai did not give an updated shutdown date.
Meanwhile, Beth Israel remains open. The conditional approval, however, carries certain stipulations that must be fulfilled.
According to a spokesperson, these include “formalizing agreements between nearby hospitals to ensure patients have access to inpatient treatment; running a 24/7 primary and urgent-care clinic for at least three months after closure; and formalizing an agreement with NYC Health + Hospitals to invest in the expansion of Bellevue Hospital’s emergency department and comprehensive psychiatric emergency programs.”
As opposed to a potentially only temporary urgent-care center, by contrast, after St. Vincent’s Hospital shuttered in Greenwich Village in 2010, Northwell Health opened a robust, high-level care, stand-alone E.R. at 12th Street and Seventh Avenue on part of the former hospital campus. Today, that facility is currently celebrating its 10th anniversary.
In a statement, Loren Riegelhaupt, a Mount Sinai spokesperson, said the hospital was “grateful for the D.O.H.’s careful and comprehensive review of our proposed closure plan. We have also asked the state court for an expedited review of the legal case brought by the Community Coalition to Save Beth Israel Hospital and the New York Eye and Ear Infirmary seeking to compel the hospital to remain open. We hope to have a favorable resolution of this matter soon.”
According to news reports, Mount Sinai will open a 24/7 urgent-care center on E. 14th Street just a couple of blocks away from Beth Israel that will accept all health insurance, plus will also operate an ambulance Downtown.
Mount Sinai argues that Beth Israel had been losing $18 million per month, making it economically unviable to keep open. However, opponents charge Mount Sinai, in recent years, has purposefully “sabotaged” Beth Israel’s finances by transferring out medical departments to its other hospitals, with the goal of selling off the hospital’s lucrative real estate, located just off of Stuyvesant Square Park.
An earlier plan to demolish Beth Israel and replace it with a mini-hospital at 13th Street and Second Avenue sputtered out during the COVID pandemic and was ultimately scrapped two years ago.
Greenwich Village attorney Arthur Schwartz, the lead counsel for the lawsuit brought by the Community Coalition to Save Beth Israel Hospital, slammed both D.O.H. and Governor Hochul as negligent in not fighting to save the E. 16th Street hospital.
“The approval issued by the Department of Health is not unexpected,” Schwartz said. “D.O.H. has been laggard in defending the interests of the community ever since Mount Sinai began the process of shutting down Beth Israel back in 2017: They approved shutting heart surgery, maternity, pediatric surgery and neonatal care in 2017 without any public notice, knowing that Mt. Sinai was aiming to shut the place down by 2018. A lawsuit slowed that down until the pandemic.
“Even though D.O.H.’s own regulations required no diminution of services after a hospital closure is proposed,” Schwartz said, “D.O.H. stood idly by as Beth Israel terminated doctors, transferred nurses and other health professionals, and shut down services starting in November. They did nothing to stop Beth Israel or to restore services. The only reason that the hospital is still functioning is because we got a temporary restraining order back in February, which remains in place.
“This loss of vital services can only be blamed on Governor Hochul, who is a big fan of hospital closures. She didn’t succeed at Downstate [SUNY Downstate Medical Services University, in Brooklyn], but she succeeded here. Mount Sinai, which grossed $23 billion last year, $3 billion of which came from Beth Israel, began stripping Beth Israel of its key services soon after buying it in 2013. In court, all we hear from them is about money — but every single hospital run by Mt. Sinai theoretically loses money.
“We are still in court and we still have a temporary restraining order in place,” the attorney stated. “We intend to keep on fighting.”
In a statement, the Campaign to Save Beth Israel and the New York Eye & Ear Infirmary condemned the D.O.H. granting conditional approval for the Beth Israel closure plan. A recent report by Crain’s exposed that Mount Sinai had spent $72,000 in lobbying fees in the push to close Beth Israel.
“We are shocked and deeply dismayed that New York State Health Commissioner James McDonald has succumbed to a high-pressure lobby campaign by Mount Sinai Health System to approve closure of Beth Israel Medical Center without even agreeing to meet with community leaders and members and our local elected public officials, despite long-standing requests,” the campaign said.
“We just learned last evening from Beth Israel nursing staff that Mount Sinai’s claims about dire understaffing at the hospital allegedly jeopardizing patent care is completely untrue, that nurse-patient ratios are conforming to state standards, that attending physicians are providing quality care…and that ambulances are being diverted from nearby Bellevue Hospital to Beth Israel’s emergency department for care.
“State officials have been intentionally misled by Mount Sinai. Commissioner McDonald’s action will now turn much of Lower Manhattan into yet another ‘hospital desert’ in our city, leaving tens of thousands of people without access to hospital care. We call on him to immediately rescind and reconsider his decision, and then sit down with us to hear our concerns, something he has so far refused to do.
“The ‘conditions’ Commissioner McDonald has attached to his approval provide meaningless protections for Lower Manhattan residents and workers — they would be laughable were the results not so serious. An urgent-care center that merely operates for three months and is not even built and operating yet is an insult to our communities. Further, any expansion of the emergency department at Bellevue Hospital Center will be months, if not years, away from now, so it is a completely empty gesture that just feigns concern for our communities.
“By coincidence, our campaign has been planning to release two new ‘Reports from the Community’ today: one concerns the history of decimation of clinical services at Beth Israel Medical Center by Mount Sinai Health System, and the other concerns Mount Sinai Health System’s mismanagement of the four former Continuum Health Partners hospitals that were acquired by MSHS in 2013 (Beth Israel Medical Center, New York Eye and Ear Infirmary, Roosevelt Hospital and St. Lukes Hospital.) Our reports were sent to Commissioner McDonald this afternoon along with a cover letter.”
I wonder how much it would cost to buy and reopen a hospital in Lower Manhattan?
Here’s how to keep Beth Israel open. Put hundreds of Citi Bike rental stations around the hospital, place some dining sheds out front and encase it all in scaffolding, then encircle the block with bike lanes, put e-bike charging stations on the sidewalks and rent some nearby storefronts for illegal cannabis sales. You’re all set! No one would dare do anything to disturb THAT utopia — not even Mount Sinai.