New York Legislature Expected To Vote On Commission Recommendations During Special Session
New York Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno (R) on Thursday said that he expects the New York Legislature to vote on the report recommending a major reorganization of hospitals in the state when it is called back for a special session on Dec. 13, Long Island Newsday reports (Jones, Long Island Newsday, 12/1). New York Gov. George Pataki (R) and the state Legislature formed the New York state Commission on Health Care Facilities in the 21st Century last year to recommend changes to the state’s health care system. The commission last week released its recommendations, including closing nine hospitals and reconfiguring 48 additional hospitals. The recommendations would reduce the number of hospital beds in the state by at least 4,200, or 7%. The commission estimated that the recommendations would increase revenue at hospitals that remain open by $720 million per year and save Medicare, Medicaid and other insurers $800 million annually. Pataki and Gov.-elect Eliot Spitzer (D) on Wednesday endorsed the report. The Legislature can block the plan only if both chambers vote against it in its entirety by Dec. 31. If the plan becomes law, it will take effect on Jan. 1, 2007 (Kaiser Daily Health Policy Report, 11/30). Bruno said he has not come to any conclusions about the report and said lawmakers are “looking at what the ramifications” of the recommendations are (Long Island Newsday, 12/1). Pataki’s Position
The New York Times on Friday examined how some people believe Pataki’s approval of the commission report appears to be a reversal from his stance in the 1990s that competition and the free market should run the state health care system. Edmund McMahon, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a former Pataki aide, said the “commission reflects a mindset that is diametrically opposed to the principles the governor articulated in his first term.” Pamela Brier, president of Maimonides Medical Center and a former top executive of the New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation, said, “The Pataki administration [during its first term] said the marketplace should decide everything.” Officials say that mindset contributed to “a medical arms race, in which hospitals believed that to compete” they must expand, “even as their businesses declined,” and they “allowed essential investments in things like computer systems to lag and made ruinous deals with insurers,” the Times reports. Pataki said the commission’s report “reinforces our commitment to those market and competitive forces” (Pérez-Peña, New York Times, 12/1).
