NYC's 'Health Care for All' collides with hospitals bleeding cash

Crain's New York Business reports:

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio says he’s turning the city into a model for how the nation can provide health care to all, including the poor, the uninsured and undocumented immigrants.

In doing so, he boasts he’s saved the city’s public hospitals from bankruptcy and can provide universal care for just $100 million by steering New Yorkers away from emergency rooms and into managed-care clinics. Yet he may have promised more than he can deliver.

The system of 11 hospitals – which already provide free care to the uninsured – costs taxpayers more than $2 billion a year, while scheduled federal Medicaid cuts threaten another $1 billion or more in the next year. Those pressures may far outstrip the savings he expects to reap from his proposal, according to private and government analysts familiar with the agency known as NYC Health + Hospitals.

“It may show a positive cash flow compared with last year, but it certainly doesn’t have surplus,” said Stephen Berger, a private equity investor who supervised New York’s budget during its 1970s fiscal crisis and in 2006 led a state health-care commission. “Its underused hospitals should be shut down but that’s not going to happen. Whether it can achieve financial stability remains to be seen.”

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