So it’s back to the beginning for Cobble Hill’s Long Island College Hospital — unless Gov. Cuomo stands tall and finally, definitively, puts the old dog out of its misery.
LICH tumbled into Alice’s rabbit hole a long time ago, at least in public-policy terms. It’s an institution that made perfect economic sense a generation ago, when a lot of hospitals kept themselves fiscally afloat by filling their beds with patients who had no real medical reason to be there at all.
But in the 21st century, when the clinical consensus and most of the funding protocols combine to heavily constrict hospital use, the reality is this: LICH is a 500-bed facility with a current patient census of about 50, which loses at least $13 million a month — with no end in sight.
You’d think they’d just shut the place down.
Not in New York.
Instead, the State University of New York — for reasons best known to then-Gov. David Paterson — bought the joint four years ago. Never mind that it was a cash incinerator; never mind that Brooklyn had too many hospital beds anyway — and especially never mind that nobody at SUNY had Clue One what to do with LICH once it took title.
The university then came to its senses, and pretty quickly tried to do the sensible thing: Shut the obsolete acute-care hospital down and develop the choice real estate that it sits on — but only with an iron-clad requirement that a modern emergency facility and expansive clinic space be included in the final product.
In policy terms, that made perfect sense.
In the real world, not so much: The proposal generated enraged opposition from hyper-entitled Brownstone Brooklynites, health-care unionists, judges who doubtless know better and opportunistic politicians by the truckload — all of which explains the zombie-like resilience of Long Island College Hospital.
Eons of litigation-driven turmoil came to a resolution of sorts in February, when it was agreed to put LICH’s future out to competitive bid. In a nutshell, SUNY would get to shed its financial albatross, while potential developers of the hospital’s real estate would compete to see who best could replace the old dinosaur.
Surprise: They came up with a replica dinosaur.
That is, the apparent winning bidder promises to replace the existing full-service hospital with a slightly downsized, shinier version of the same thing.
And the state Department of Health is expected to — indeed, must — ratify the deal by May 22, or it goes poof.
Now, there are a number of reasons why it probably should go poof. For one thing, the winning bidder — an entity called Brooklyn Health Partners — appears to have been cobbled together for the express purpose of competing for the LICH development site.
That’s fine, as far as it goes, but it’s also true that the company Brooklyn Partners has tabbed actually to run its proposed new hospital, Quorum Health Resources, is a for-profit health-care provider that has never done business in New York — where, in any event, for-profit hospitals are illegal.
And, according to Capital New York, Brooklyn Partners has at least tenuous ties to one of the nine other bidders seeking development rights.
Questions remain to be answered, in other words.
And here’s where the governor needs to step in and clarify one critical point: He needs to leave no doubt that when it all shakes out, there will be no full-service hospital as part of any LICH settlement package. That his health commissioner will be issuing no licenses for anything other than on-site clinics and an ER.
He knows what has to be done, and why. “You have [hospital] beds that you don’t need,” he told Crain’s Business in February. “You have to close beds [in Brooklyn] and plan a countywide, boroughwide health-care system that makes sense.”
Now, no way does a resuscitated LICH make sense — except, perhaps, in a political context. For Cuomo unequivocally to do the right thing could likely mean that the Cobble Hill white elephant becomes a flashpoint issue in a major political campaign for the second year in a row.
Not on the scale of last year, when Bill de Blasio’s grandstanding there arguably got him elected mayor.
But as Cuomo continues his re-election-year pas de deux with the labor cat’s-paw Working Families Party, sending LICH to its reward wouldn’t help his case: Not for nothing is health-care workers Local 1199 the straw that stirs the WFP drink.
Nevertheless, LICH is untenable; it’s as simple as that.
Cuomo just needs to put an end to the full-service-hospital drama, before more millions are wasted. All the rest will follow in due course. Including a comfortable re-election.