Opinion

Hospital emergency

Today’s the day the redevelopment of Long Island College Hospital finally moves forward — unless the activists succeed in gaming the bidding system to stop it.

Nine bidders have submitted proposals to purchase from SUNY the essentially bankrupt LICH, which is losing $13 million a month. Five want to maintain a full-service hospital. Under a court settlement reached last month, the scoring process awards significantly higher points to such bids.

But four of those five bidders have never run a hospital before, and the other isn’t licensed to do so in New York. Which means that a successful bidder will have to go through the state licensing process.

That’s where things get tricky. An applicant who wants a license to run a hospital must demonstrate genuine community need as well as financial stability. On the need, Gov. Cuomo and his health commissioner have each made clear Brooklyn has an unaffordable glut of hospital beds. Which means lenders may be reluctant to finance any proposal without a license.

When the activists read news stories reporting this, they went ballistic, which is why the bidding was extended until today. Meanwhile, it’s telling that the four bids that envision a combination of acute-care facilities and residential housing all come from current New York hospitals. Institutions, in other words, that understand the realities, fiscal and otherwise, of today’s community health-care needs.

The activists hope to game the system so that their preference for a full-service hospital prevails. Let’s hope they don’t succeed. Health care is changing — and Brooklyn’s health delivery must change with it.