By Arthur Z. Schwartz
Photo: Arthur Z. Schwartz
On February 1, led by the Community Coalition to Save Beth Israel Hospital and New York Eye and Ear Infirmary, an array of East and West Villagers filed suit to stop Mount Sinai Health System from closing Beth Israel Hospital. Mt. Sinai has plans to shut down all services by the end of March and continues to press the NY State Department of Health for permission.
Less than 24 months ago, as we emerged from the COVID Pandemic, Mt. Sinai Beth Israel Chief Medical Officer Jeremy Boals, who had tried to downsize Beth Israel to 70 beds in 2018 (only to be met by a lawsuit which blocked the closure), said that the dramatic reduction of beds no longer made sense after grappling to treat a surge of patients during the COVID-19 outbreak. He stated, “The pandemic has taught us many lessons. It is with these lessons in mind that we have taken a careful look at our original plan for the new hospital. This analysis has led us to a different conclusion with regard to the best approach to caring for the communities that depend on MSBI [Mount Sinai-Beth Israel].”
Beth Israel tried to shut down just as the pandemic began, and was embarrassed into opening its 695 beds to COVID patients after the city set up a hospital at the Javitz Center. They were finally realizing that a full-service hospital below 23rd Street was needed by over 400,000 downtown residents. And then, in September 2023, Boals announced that Mt. Sinai didn’t want to just downsize Beth Israel, it wanted to shut it. And, they renewed efforts to shut the renowned NY Eye and Ear Infirmary on 14th and 2nd Avenue. Their reason? Beth Israel was “losing money.”
This claim has to be understood in a context which those of us fighting the plan find astounding.
The Mt. Sinai system has greater revenues than many countries in the world!! Here are the numbers for 2023:
Mt. Sinai Upper East Side $12,046,488,070 (yes 12 billion!)
Mt. Sinai Roosevelt/St Lukes $5,544,120,782
Mt. Sinai Beth Israel $3,943,522,673
NY Eye and Ear $ 431,288,946
That is over $23 billion in revenue just in Manhattan. That’s as much as the Gross National Product of Jamaica. According to statistics published by the American Hospital Directory, Beth Israel lost $172 million in 2023. But the mother ship on the Upper East Side lost $195,716,997 in 2023, Mt. Sinai Roosevelt/St Lukes lost $122,118,882 in 2023, and NYEE lost $24,795,998 in 2023. So why choose Beth Israel and blame the closure on losses? Because the real estate on the south end of the Gramercy Park-Stuyvesant Park area is very, very valuable.
What the process has shown is that Mt. Sinai doesn’t really care about health care, and the 70,000 Emergency Room visits at Beth Israel last year. Even though it is a “non-profit” it cares only about dollars. When Mt. Sinai bought Beth Israel in 2012 it was a profitable hospital. But Mt. Sinai started stripping services. By 2017 you couldn’t have a baby there – even though the Maternity Ward and Neo-Natal Care were enormously profitable – and busy. After 2017 you couldn’t have heart surgery there; if you came with a heart attack and needed anything more than a stent, you went back into an ambulance. Doctors started to leave sensing a dead end. While surgeries were filling up NYU-Langone, Beth Israel (except during COVID) featured hundreds of empty beds.
In December the Health Department, which was likely to rubber stamp the Mt. Sinai-Beth Israel closure “Health Equity Assessment,” was embarrassed into ordering a Cease and Desist as Beth Israel was being emptied without DOH permission. But nurses and professionals continued to leave, so the lawsuit was filed seeking both to stop the flow and force DOH to turn Mt. Sinai down.
The lawsuit alleges that closing a hospital, with no real alternative for the people of Lower Manhattan, violates the NY State Constitutional guarantee of “adequate healthcare,” and violates the Public Health Law, amended in 2023 to prevent closures which adversely affect poor communities (25% of the two principal zip codes for admissions to BI have 25% or more of their residents living below the Federal “Poverty Level.”) The plaintiffs also allege that the shutdown violates the Americans With Disabilities Act and the NYC Human Rights Law because of its adverse impact on an extremely large community of people with disabilities.
A court appearance is expected during the first two weeks of February.
Arthur Schwartz is lead attorney for the plaintiffs in the Beth Israel closure litigation.