Local health care is key (photo: Michael Appleton/Mayoral Photography Office)
When COVID-19 struck 15 months ago, where did those who became infected and seriously ill go? To their nearest hospital.
Hospitals quickly became inundated with patients, and healthcare workers worked around the clock to save tens of thousands of lives. ICU beds filled up, and there was heavy demand on a limited number of ventilators.
While all hospitals were impacted, it was New York’s most vulnerable communities – and the hospitals that serve them – that were hit the hardest. These “safety net” hospitals provide essential care to lower-income and rural communities throughout the state. Without them, many New Yorkers would be forced to go much further to get the medical help they needed.
Now these safety net hospitals need a safety net of their own. Financial struggles were a way of life for them long before the pandemic, and every week was a fight to keep their doors open. After all, these hospitals serve the most underserved New Yorkers, including those who are underinsured or have no insurance at all. Covid simply exacerbated what was already a serious problem and has created an existential threat for many of these hospitals.
Despite the critical role our safety net hospitals play in our communities, they receive little outside funding and are underpaid by Medicaid and Medicare. This chronic underfunding creates financial stress, making it difficult for facilities to make ends meet. It is not a stretch to say that most of these hospitals are in serious danger of closing their doors for good.
While safety hospitals struggle, Governor Andrew Cuomo and the State Legislature have allocated $250 million in state funding (the Distressed Provider Assistance Account) for “financially distressed” health-care institutions “that are critical safety-net providers as determined by the state.” This annual funding was included in the state budget but has not yet been spent. New York is sitting on critically important funding that could be a temporary lifeline. The state must begin allocating this funding immediately.
The services safety net hospitals provide are not just related to the COVID-19 pandemic. These institutions are an essential piece of infrastructure in our communities, whether someone needs maternal care, treatment for a chronic illness, or has an accident and needs access to trauma care. If these hospitals close, the New Yorkers who rely on them will be forced to travel longer distances, potentially complicating an already dangerous situation.
What’s more, these hospitals provide good-paying jobs to the medical professionals in their communities. Without them, patients who desperately need care will suffer, as will those medical professionals who suddenly find themselves out of a job. It is no understatement that hospitals truly are a linchpin for communities throughout the state. Yet, they are edging closer to financial catastrophe.
Critical funding cannot wait any longer. The $250 million that New York has allocated for safety net hospitals needs to be released as soon as possible to help keep them afloat. And going forward, more must be done to ensure that safety net hospitals keep their doors open and continue providing critical services to the New Yorkers who rely on them the most.
***
Jamilah Lasalle is a co-founder of Bait-ul Jamaat – House of Community, a community organization in Staten Island focused on various programs, educational series and advocacy support to the underserved. On Twitter @cprmuslimah & @baituljamaat.
***
Have an op-ed idea or submission for Gotham Gazette? Email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
In the State Senate (photo: NY Senate Media Services)
While Joe Manchin and Mitch McConnell compete to see who can block the most policy down in Washington DC, here in New York State our Democratic majorities in the State Senate and Assembly are proving that the government can be good. And that governing can actually solve problems.
Earlier this month, Albany’s 2021 legislative session came to a close and legislators should be proud for having made progress on a host of fundamental issues impacting millions of New Yorkers. The legislature raised $4.3 billion in new progressive revenue to fund major investments in public education and to fuel economic relief in the wake of COVID-19. We saw the historic passage of a first-in-the-nation excluded workers fund for New Yorkers who were denied federal relief. And we saw the long overdue legalization of marijuana, the passage of a host of new voting reforms to make it easier and more secure to vote, new regulations to rein in the gun crisis, and a halt to prolonged solitary confinement in our prisons. And this list is far from exhaustive.
Despite all this progress, Albany’s session coming to a close for the year on June 10 inevitably leads to a few fundamental questions. What didn’t get accomplished? And why does the session end at all? Especially with six months to go in the calendar year.
Let’s start with the second question given it clearly impacts the first. It’s true that in many states across the country, state elected officials work as a part time legislature. But here in New York, electeds are full-time employees. It’s also true that our state electeds do more than just legislate. They represent their communities and through constituent services, help solve locally relevant and deeply personal challenges for their constituents. But as seen in the list above, it’s the legislation that gives taxpayers the biggest bang for their bucks. In other words, we elect them to legislate.
And an arbitrary six-month session in New York is holding us back. Moving to a full-year legislative calendar with ample recesses to allow for critical in-district work would unlock massive productivity in Albany. While you certainly can’t look to Congress for great examples of productivity these days thanks to the Jim Crow filibuster and a GOP that’s primary goal is to prove government fundamentally doesn’t work, we should look to their calendar as the model for New York’s legislature. Or to California. California’s state legislature is paid a full-time salary just like New York’s and they work a full calendar year. Simply put, we need our full-time state elected officials to, well, work full-time.
And this isn’t just about creating more time to pass policy. It’s also about removing one of the most frustrating tools in our elected officials’ toolbox that puts a pause on progress. The June end of session deadline acts as an unnecessary and misused “cliff” year over year to block or to slow down important policies. “We just didn’t have the time to get it done” is a phrase we have become all too used to hearing from the middle of June through the end of the year. So this brings us to the first of the questions raised above. What didn’t pass this year?
Let’s take the climate crisis to start. There is no denying that every day we delay action on climate, the more likely it is our planet will be uninhabitable to our youngest generations. Back in 2019, the New York state legislature passed the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA), a nation leading bill that set aggressive and necessary emission reduction targets for the state. But without further legislation to enact the guardrails, programs, and investments to achieve those targets, the CLCPA is just a promise. And promises won’t solve the climate crisis. This year, the Climate and Community Investment Act (CCIA) — which would raise $15 billion per year from corporate polluters and use it to create good, green jobs, invest in frontline communities, and build a renewable economy for New York State — was the legislature’s best opportunity to turn that promise into action. And yet it didn’t pass. In fact, it didn’t even get a vote.
So I guess it’s better luck next session? In the face of an existential crisis, our plan is to take a break for six months?
And make no mistake, this is just one of many examples where real issues go unresolved for months because of the legislative calendar.
For example: Despite being prioritized in the State Senate, five bills supported by the Sexual Harassment Working Group and the Adult Survivors Act, which would give victims a one-year look-back period to seek justice through civil cases, stalled in the Assembly. Assembly leadership used the clock-running-out excuse to justify the failure to pass these meaningful policies.
Last year, when in the face of a global pandemic that was wreaking havoc on our communities, and disproportionately so on Black and brown New Yorkers, the legislature was quiet from July through December. It’s true, many state legislators were working tirelessly in their communities supporting mutual aid and other constituent services, but their mighty power of policy was left totally unused.
To be clear, it’s not to say these issues are easy to solve. It would be crazy to suggest that legislators have an easy job or that massive legislation like the CCIA doesn’t take time to get right. But that’s exactly the point. There should be no “end of session rush.” Moving to a congressional style, full-year legislative session is better for all involved. Except for the bad actors who want the government to do less or fail more. But New Yorkers continue to show up at the polls to elect better officials each year. And better electeds with more time to legislate will surely bring us better outcomes.
It’s time for a full-year legislative calendar in Albany.
***
Ricky Silver is a co-lead organizer of Empire State Indivisible. On Twitter @es_indivisible.
***
Have an op-ed idea or submission for Gotham Gazette? Email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Reading New York (photo: Ed Reed/Mayoral Photography Office)
Another school year has passed, the most unusual I can remember. Forced into remote learning by the pandemic, I never actually met any of my students. All I could see were twenty-four curious and anxious faces in small squares across the computer screen. They were there, nevertheless, fully engaged in our journey through New York City history, politics, and government, trying to get a better grip on the city that has been a destination for generations in pursuit of the American Dream.
My Hunter College students bring their own distinct life experiences to our conversations: immigrant, migrant, and native born; Black, brown and white; LBGTQ and not; often challenged economically, rarely privileged. They know New York; they are New York. This is CUNY.
So where might we begin this conversation? Is New York a place or an idea? A destination or an illusion? Does it have a special meaning or purpose? Or is it different things to different people? How does this complex metropolis add up? Does this creature called Gotham have a soul? If so, is it a kind and generous soul that cares for those who are struggling? Or has it a mean and competitive disposition, accepting the harsh notion that only the “fittest” will survive?
All were relevant questions as the city approached one of the most consequential elections in history. Might the outcome of that election tell us something about the soul of New York? Whether its instincts are kinder or meaner?
Before digging into the usual academic material, we began our journey by taking a literary route. New York has drawn the attention of many great writers. Through their special gifts they see things more keenly than the rest of us do, often sooner, and then explain them in ways that become memorable.
We began with Italo Calvino. Calvino (1972) draws pictures with words. He presents the idea of the city in multiple dimensions: as physical structures composed of bricks and mortar, as webs of intricate relationships among people, as storehouses of traditions and memories that carry us forward. Each individual, he reminds us, is only a temporary visitor. While one might hope to influence the direction it takes, the city is a complex organism that has an ever-changing mind and a momentum of its own. How humbling!
Writing in 1968, Joan Didion recalls life as a twenty-two-year-old arriving from California in a city of endless possibility, certain that “something extraordinary would happen,” seeming confident it would happen to her. Full of youthful energy, she is determined to engage the city all on her own, without reaching out to her father, who would surely mail her a check to help out when things got tough. Junot Diaz (2000) never would have contemplated doing that with his dad. The elder Diaz had arrived in Nuova York from the Dominican Republic only to discover that he could not afford to live here, settling instead in a Section 8 apartment in New Jersey, taking on “crap jobs” to eke out a meager living for his family. When college-educated Junot arrived at the age of twenty-six, he had no choice but to take on the city, whose skyline looked like “science fiction,” with only his own limited resources.
An upbeat E.B. White (1949) insisted that it is the “settlers” who give New York its passion, for “each embraces New York with the intense excitement of first love, each absorbs New York with the fresh eyes of an adventurer.” He goes on: “The city is like poetry: it compresses all life, all races and breeds into a small island and adds music and the accompaniment of internal engines.” White described city neighborhoods, with their grocery stores, saloons, and barbershops as “self-sufficient” communities that give meaning to daily life, cocoons of comfort that shelter one from the cold anonymity of a big city existence. Perhaps he had never met the likes of a Diaz.
Nor a Jean Kwok (2012), who tells the story of a Chinese immigrant mother who spends long days working in a sweatshop as she unsuccessfully struggles to navigate New York’s cultural landscape for her talented daughter. The more her daughter assimilates through the world of dance, the more she distances herself from her loving mother. Can there be a bigger price to pay to become a full-fledged New Yorker? Such pain is out of sight for those who have never made that long immigrant passage.
John Steinbeck (1943) recalls two entries into the city. The first time here, after graduating from Stanford, he made decent money “wheeling cement” in a construction job he found through a family contact before another relative got him a spot on a local newspaper covering stories in Brooklyn and Queens. Journalism didn’t pan out for him. He knew little about newspaper writing and was fired. After his girlfriend dumped him for a banker, he left the “cold and heartless” city returning to California a defeated young man. As he put it, the city had “beat the pants off me.”
Steinbeck’s “second assault on New York” was “different but just as ridiculous as the first.” He had just won a Pulitzer Prize for The Grapes of Wrath and was under contract with Paramount Pictures for Tortilla Flat. He was now living in an Upper East Side townhouse with a private garden. As he got to know the local butcher, news dealer, and liquor man, “Everything fell into place.” His neighborhood became his village, just as White imagined, and things that might have annoyed him the first time around suddenly became part of New York’s charm.
James Baldwin (1960) also recalls the role of storekeepers in the Harlem of his childhood. Those who survived economically extended credit to their customers when people had no money – not that the grocers had much of a choice. Rather than a source of comfort, Baldwin writes with bitterness about his segregated community where residents felt trapped. He describes the “hideous projects” as “colorless, bleak, high and revolting.” For him, they “provide proof of how thoroughly the white world despises” their Black residents. No signs of privilege here. No family with money or connections. As he put it, being Black, gay, and poor, he had hit the “trifecta.” Baldwin writes with conviction and does not resort to hyperbole because he knows it is not needed. He recounts incidences of police violence and the animosity between citizens and officers as if he were writing today.
Baldwin’s fellow Harlem resident, Langston Hughes (1951), foresaw how the tension would eventually explode “like a raisin in the sun.” In the mid-1960s that collective frustration exploded with rioting in cities throughout the country, as it did last summer in less violent forms after the murder of George Floyd.
Were these authors all writing about the same city? Well, yes and no. They all lived in New York, but in very different places. While writing at different points in time, their observations are timeless. New York is full of conflicts, tensions, and inequities. Depending on which piece of it is yours, life in New York can be an adventure or a struggle. But, which piece of it reveals the true soul of the city?
Well versed in the wisdom of Jane Jacobs, many of my students find the soul of the city on the neighborhood sidewalks where people interact. They will tell you that the physical city, with its corporate offices, luxury high rises, and dilapidated walk-ups all reveal the essence of New York. They are well aware of the contradictions. They want to believe that kinder instincts will eventually govern, but are not sure that will happen.
In search of more answers, we turned our attention to politics as an indication of the instincts that can prevail. Over the years, New York City has had some formidable personalities to assume the role as its chief executive. At different points in time they have represented a collective spirit of the city, along with its anxieties and aspirations – or at least the sentiment of those who vote or partake in its voluble political life. That is where the priorities are set. That is where decisions are made regarding who wins and who loses.
This is part one of a two-part reflection. Read part two, on politics, leadership and New York City mayors, here.
***
Joseph P. Viteritti is the Thomas Hunter Professor of Public Policy at Hunter College. His more recent books on New York include, The Pragmatist: Bill de Blasio’s Quest to Save the Soul of New York and Summer in the City: John Lindsay, New York and the American Dream.
***
Have an op-ed idea or submission for Gotham Gazette? Email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.