Mark your calendar for Friday, March 22. That is the day when thousands of healthcare workers, patient advocates, homecare consumers, and others will join in a series of coordinated actions across the state—in New York City, Buffalo, Hempstead, Poughkeepsie, Rochester, Syracuse, and Yonkers. Manhattan will be host to the largest march for health care in recent memory. Join us at 3 p.m. at Stuyvesant Square Park for this historic day.
Why? Because there is a very real possibility that Governor Kathy Hochul will sign a budget by April 1 that includes disastrous cuts to health care and fails to adequately fund Medicaid, the primary health insurer for more than 7 million low-income New Yorkers.
Four years ago this month, COVID-19 arrived in New York. In the subsequent months and years, more than 80,000 New Yorkers died from the virus, affecting people from all walks of life, but the pandemic did not fall equally on everyone. Blacks and Latinos had death rates twice that of the white population.
This crisis—the greatest public health emergency in 100d years—unmasked the severity of the healthcare disparities plaguing our communities. Have we learned any lessons?
With health care currently on the chopping block in New York State, you would think not. The governor’s proposal, rather than investing resources to reduce health inequities, inexplicably calls for hundreds of millions of cuts to healthcare programs while failing to sufficiently fund Medicaid.
And this comes at a time when the state is sitting on an unprecedented $45 billion in reserves.
Many of these cuts, as of this writing, are still unspecified, but one cut that has already been laid out is especially cruel: reducing wages by $3 an hour for thousands of dedicated homecare workers employed in the Consumer Directed Personal Assistance Program (CDPAP).
This important program allows people with disabilities who need in-home care to hire caregivers of their own choosing without going through a private company, giving them control over their personal health needs.
New York is already facing a major shortage of homecare workers, and cutting CDPAP wages will not only devastate these workers’ livelihoods, but also make it more difficult for consumers to find in-home care when they need it. Do we really want to force seniors and people with disabilities out of their own homes and into institutionalized settings? That will be the unfortunate outcome if CDPAP cuts aren’t reversed, and why the disability rights community is so outraged by that prospect.
Perhaps the most glaring omission in the governor’s proposed budget is the failure to close the Medicaid funding gap in New York. Here is the problem in a nutshell: If you have private health insurance, your insurance company will compensate your healthcare provider for the full cost of care you received, but if you are on Medicaid, your healthcare provider will only be reimbursed by New York State, on average, for 70% of the cost of your care.
This funding shortfall puts a huge financial burden on healthcare institutions serving low-income communities with high Medicaid enrollments. It results in the inability of hospitals and nursing homes to hire enough staff, provide a broad array of services and specialist care, or even keep their doors open at all.
As a result, we have seen a wave of actual and looming hospital closures, upstate and downstate: Mount Sinai Beth Israel, SUNY Downstate, Eastern Niagara Hospital, and Kingsbrook Jewish Medical Center, to name a few. Maternity wards have been closing at a rate of two per year statewide, creating more and more maternity care deserts as our state’s infant mortality rate rises.
Medicaid was born out of the Civil Rights Movement, originally signed into law as part of the 1965 Social Security Act. Over the ensuing decades, it has been one of the most successful anti-poverty programs in our nation’s history—but without proper funding in New York, it cannot meet its purpose of reducing healthcare disparities. This is the message that thousands of New Yorkers will be taking to the streets on March 22.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once famously stirred us into action by declaring, “If you can’t fly, run; if you can’t run, walk; if you can’t walk, crawl; but by all means, keep moving.” I’ll be there on my mobility scooter on March 22—rolling along, with many of you, I hope, in pursuit of healthcare justice.
George Gresham is president of 1199SEIU United Healthcare Workers East, the largest union of healthcare workers in the nation.
What happened to the rally today, Friday, March 22nd, 2024, that was supposed to take place ibn New York City and Albany? There are absolutely no articles or reviews or news reports to be found on this supposed urgently needed public forum and an explanation why it was not reported on, or if need it even took place at all. WHAT’S OUR NEXT MOVE???