Someone on Facebook said the problem in New York is so bad because they have close 17 hospitals in the last 10 years. I thought this was interesting an could explain why New York is doing so poorly. I found this article:
https://citylimits.org/2017/01/04/hospital-closures-and-medicaid-shifts-took-toll-on-nycs-health/
Five years ago, a group of survey takers set out on a deceptively simple task—to ask people what brought them to the emergency room. For two weeks in the summer of 2011 and again in the winter, the surveyors, including medical students, hospital staff and hospital volunteers, visited six hospital emergency rooms in northern and central Brooklyn and asked the simplest of questions: Why are you here?
Of all the answers that surprised the survey gatherers for the Brooklyn Health Improvement Project, the most surprising one was also the simplest: It was easier and more convenient to sit in an ER waiting room than to try and find a doctor who would see them and help them the same day. It was easier to sit and wait in one place than to be bounced around by phone, put on hold or put off entirely. The added benefit of the ER waiting room: It was near the hospital specialists, labs, pharmacies and outpatient clinics. Rather than travel all over to see an internist, get blood work done, get into the radiologist for a CAT scan, any follow-up you needed could be done the same day or soon after, in the same place. Like getting food for the week, back-to-school clothes and a new bike at Target—getting all your health care needs met at the hospital just made sense.
Until, that is, the city started closing them. Since 2003, 16 hospitals have closed around New York City, four in Brooklyn alone, putting more and more pressure on the remaining hospitals to see more patients under more crowded and facility-challenged conditions. For families living in poor neighborhoods, more hospital closings have put greater pressure on the surviving facilities, and they have also stretched the distances people have to travel to receive care.
A system shifts
Roger Green, executive director of the DuBois-Bunche Center for Public Policy at Medgar Evers College, believes that the direct economic impact of changes in the medical industry has fed into the neighborhood’s economic problems, thus exacerbating the health crises.
The privatization and consolidation of the medical sector in Brooklyn has caused hospitals and clinics to close, and in their wake, affected the fortunes of the locally owned businesses that provided goods and services to the health care system, say health care advocates. As part of an ongoing effort to study the financial effects of hospital closures and consolidations, Green and a group of health care advocates recently met with Councilman Robert Cornegy from Brooklyn, chair of the Committee on Small Business, to request funding to track and assess the changes in the health care labor market over the past 10 years, “to look at the supply chain and see where those dollars are going,” says Green.
For Judy Wessler, a long-time health care advocate, the hospital closings and consolidations were compounded by the state cuts to Medicaid reimbursement in 2012, exacerbating the financial fragility of the safety-net hospitals and putting care, and jobs, in jeopardy, something, she says, the state has not taken fully into account.
“It didn’t hurt the big guys,” says Wessler of the 2 percent across-the-board Medicaid reimbursement cut in 2012; “It hurt the health care facilities that primarily take care of low-income people and people on Medicaid”—health care facilities such as Interfaith, at the nexus of Bedford-Stuyvesant, Crown Heights and Brownsville; Brookdale in East New York; Kingsbrook Jewish in East Flatbush and Wyckoff in Bushwick.
