Nassau health care needs restructuring
The Nassau University Medical Center in East Meadow Credit: Howard Schnapp
Nassau health care needs restructuring
Newsday asks the wrong question in its editorial "Saving NUMC a worthy goal" [Opinion, Dec. 9]. The Nassau University Medical Center is a service of the Nassau Health Care Corporation, also known as NuHealth, the public benefit corporation created by a 1997 law to: preserve and expand as well as consolidate quality health care services for the "medically underserved." NHCC’s purpose is not to sustain any specific institution. It is to respond to community needs.
While NHCC has many dedicated employees, management squandered opportunities as health care evolved. Long Island now has five hospital systems providing cutting-edge care with sufficient inpatient capacity. NHCC’s void of strategic leadership, except for former NuHealth CEO Arthur Gianelli’s tenure, has calcified the institution, objectively bankrupt, with a debt exceeding $1 billion and growing. Deferred facility and infrastructure maintenance will require hundreds of millions of dollars to repair. A private corporation could decide to invest hundreds of millions to compete, but why should taxpayers foot the bill for a dinosaur?
The community depends upon the emergency room, behavioral health inpatient/outpatient, and medical ambulatory care. Creative restructuring, with state support and corporate partnerships, could improve services within a financially sustainable organization. Locating the services on the Uniondale campus, closer to the community, would reduce inpatient admissions and improve the community’s health status, leaving the East Meadow campus for development, reducing Nassau’s debt load.
Jobs are always and should be a concern. A restructured NHCC would not require 3,000 jobs. However, with the current vacancies in local health care systems, job security should be achievable.
The community deserves a responsible system of care supported by taxpayers, not bilked by other agendas.
Robert Detor, Port Washington
The writer, from January 2020 through May 2021, was chairman of the board that runs NUMC.
