Tonight, Wednesday, May 27, there is a community town hall about the downsizing of Columbia Memorial Hospital. The event takes place from 6:00 to 8:00 p.m. in the theater at Time & Space Limited (TSL), 434 Columbia Street in Hudson.
Community residents, frontline hospital workers represented by 1199SEIU, and elected officials including State Senator Michelle Hinchey, Assemblymember Didi Barrett, and Mayor Joseph Ferris will gather to speak out against the proposal to slash inpatient beds at Columbia Memorial Hospital from more than 192 certified beds to just 25 in order to apply for Critical Access Hospital designation. Leaders and advocates warn the proposal could increase emergency room wait times, delay lifesaving care, strain EMS services, force more patients to Albany, and deepen transportation barriers for vulnerable residents. They maintain the plan prioritizes finances over community need and follows a decade of disinvestment at the hospital since its affiliation with Albany Med.
At the town hall, organizers will present findings from a community "health equity impact assessment" informed by more than 400 surveys and in-depth interviews of residents, EMS workers, patients, and hospital staff.
Contradictions and lack of essential information plague the publicly available request for state approval submitted by CMH administrators last year. A heavily redacted version of their initial plan is available on Albany Med's website: https://digital.1199seiu.org/CMHcutsCON.
A full hospital needs patients who can pay.
ReplyDeleteThat requires growing the population, not the tax rate.
Yet Senator Hinchey and Mayor Ferris both went on the record this spring proposing higher taxes in their County, State, respectively.
It is like demanding a restaurant stay open while taxing the diners out the door.
We call this Labor Union math.
What is next, a rally to force the airline to keep flying a 192-seat jet on a 25-passenger route?
Use the right size plane for the route. Get the right sized hospital for the community you have.
OR
If you want a bigger hospital and more healthcare jobs... then fix HCSD, lower the property taxes, and then see young families move here again... who would grow and need a larger hospital.
You can only pick one.
Higher taxes in their respective spheres is most certainly not what Michelle and Joe were referring to.
DeleteBoth were talking about taxation in a far more generic sense, possibly at the federal and maybe state level.
They are proposing that unimaginably rich entities, the likes of which do not exist in Hudson nor in Michelle's district, need to start paying actual taxes as they openly promise and proceed to destroy our ways of life.
Healthcare in particular is hit hard by what is currently transpiring. All the productivity gains that are happening elsewhere cannot happen in healthcare and as a result its costs can only go up.
Michelle and Joe are only local voices but we hear the same thing in other places, too. Tom Steyer, running for Governor in California, is proposing a tax on AI tokens.
Going forward, we will be hearing more of this and rightly so - even if this offends your libertarian sensibilities. :-)
Ha! Thanks Max!
DeleteFirst, fair pushback. Another reader flagged that Hinchey et al. lower taxes on some while raising them on others.
Regardless, NY pop. exodus proves that whatever the mix, it is not working.
Second, who is libertarian? That is like calling a German Swiss. ;-)
We are Classical Liberals. "That government is best which governs least."
Our main point on labor unions and sustained public spending stands.
Hudson and the County are shrinking.
Cut or consolidate public spending, or grow the tax base.
Otherwise spending holds or rises while the tax base erodes, and you hit a doom loop.
And that is basically HCSD, this hospital, the City of Hudson Youth Center, and the rest of the County.