From the Demand A Hospital listserv comes an article that continues in the sorry pattern of media bias and no journalism ethics by Carolyn Ryan and other editors at The New York Times :
Is The NYTimes Telling us That a Drug Store Can Replace St. Vincent's Hospital to Protect Christine Quinn From Being Challenged By Activists and Residents, who Live in the Lower West Side, For Having Allowed the Hospital to Close ?
The New York Times article, New Style of Health Care Emerges to Fill Hospital’s Void and to Prop Up Christine Quinn, claims that the community seems to be doing fine without a hospital in the area -- this, in spite of the fact that North Shore-LIJ took a $10 million state grant for a money-losing urgent care center that it voluntarily closed, because it was only seeing 2 patients per day ! Nobody with heart attacks, trauma injuries, or other life-and-death healthcare emergencies would rightly trust an urgent care center with their lives.
The failure of the first North Shore-LIJ urgent care center bodes poorly for the stand alone ER. What will happen when the stand alone ER fails, as it surely will, because its business model is predicated on people willingly accepting emergency treatment from an inferior urgent care center, which any reasonable person will tell you is certainly not the case -- and can be proven by the failure of North Shore-LIJ's first urgent care center.
Was the $10 million grant a back-door incentive to North Shore-LIJ to serve as a bait-and-switch to clear the way for Bill Rudin to build his luxury condos ? Our tax money could have been used with other monies to help restructure or save St. Vincent's. We'll never know what could have been an alternate outcome, because Brad Hoylman, Christine Quinn, and others were rigging everything in favor of Rudin, who is connected to the Partnership of New York, where Brad worked.
Dr. David Kaufman is quoted in the article advocating for the need for medical care that cannot be provided by the proliferation of urgent care centers. Bravo for continuing to speak the truth as we know it.
And North Shore-LIJ CEO Michael Dowling, who is grossly addicted to his fat CEO pay package, criticises people for wanting a full-service hospital to replace St. Vincent's.
“Good hospitals are important, but you don’t need more than you need,” Mr. Dowling said. “In many cases, we’ve been addicted to inpatient beds. We can’t be addicted to them in the future.”
If you plan to write a letter to the editor, please address your e-mail to : letters@nytimes.com -- thanks for all you do !
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