LICH, Continuum and St. Vincent's

FROM BROOKLYN DAILY EAGLE


BROOKLYN — Recently Continuum Health Partners, known to Downtown Brooklyn residents as the parent company of Long Island College Hospital, backed down from its offer to buy the troubled St. Vincent’s Hospital in Greenwich Village.
The problem with this arrangement is that Continuum planned to shut down St. Vincent’s inpatient facilities, basically turn it into a giant outpatient clinic, and serve those needing immediate hospital care at its more profitable Beth Israel and Roosevelt hospitals. This would have effectively left all of the West Side of Manhattan up to the 50s without a hospital.
Local onlookers certainly noticed the similarity to Continuum’s management of Long Island College Hospital (LICH). In 2008, Continuum sought to shut down LICH’s Pediatrics, Obstetrics and Dentistry departments and sell some of the hospital’s buildings.
This gave rise to charges that Continuum’s long-range plan was to shut down the hospital entirely, sell its buildings for real estate, and use its assets to boost up Beth Israel and St. Luke’s-Roosevelt. Continuum officials denied this charge, but in the wake of the St. Vincent’s proposal, I’m not so sure that they didn’t have this in mind.
As we know, the plan to close the LICH departments was disallowed by the state Health Department. Eventually, Continuum decided that LICH was more trouble than it was worth, and signed off on a plan to let LICH detach from it and affiliate with Downstate instead.
Continuum’s behavior in both cases isn’t unique. For example, in the early 1980s, Jewish Memorial Hospital in Inwood, Upper Manhattan, went under, due to circumstances that were never really explained. A few months later, the huge Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital opened a clinic in Inwood.
What I can say, however, is that managing hospitals bears a certain responsibility because life-or-death situations depend on it. If Starbucks or a chain of shoe stores decides that it has to cut back for financial reasons, it can close a few outlets and nobody, other than a few people living within the immediate vicinity of the Starbucks outlets or the local shoe stores in question, will mind. But if an ambulance has to travel 10 more minutes to the nearest hospital, that person could die.
The LICH and St. Vincent’s debacles should urgently drive home the need to remake the nation’s healthcare system from the bottom to the top. Perhaps in 60 more years, the U.S. will be ready for a single-payer system, but how many more hospitals will have closed in the meantime?
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