Public Employee Press

Stop cuts at hospitals and CUNY

HENRY GARRIDO
Executive Director, District Council 37, AFSCME, AFL-CIO

ONE BILLION DOLLARS. That's the extra fiscal burden the city will be stuck with every year if Gov. Andrew Cuomo's executive budget is adopted.

This new burden of some $1 billion in extra annual expenditures should be a non-starter in the budget talks in Albany, where our activists have already lobbied legislators to oppose these spending reductions.

The governor's executive budget aims to impose new spending obligations on the city through what policy analysts describe as "cost shifting." By doing this, the state would abandon nearly $1 billion of its annual financial assistance to the city, which would have to assume the tab or enact deep cuts.

The spending reductions in the preliminary state budget target the City University of New York and NYC Health + Hospitals. The cuts would disproportionately affect the poor, minorities and immigrants.

The Albany-based Fiscal Policy Institute describes the cuts as "perhaps the biggest bombshell" in this year's executive budget. "This is a pernicious, unilateral shift in fiscal responsibility to a local government, essentially punishing the city for its economic and fiscal success," says FPI in the executive summary of its budget analysis.

The union is responding to a proposed $485 million cut at CUNY with a grassroots campaign that calls upon the governor to "Stop Starving CUNY!" and jump-start contract talks with the union.

You can join the campaign by going to www.cunycontractnow.org. We also encourage you to participate in a demonstration in front of the governor's office in Manhattan at 633 Third Ave. (between 40th and 41st streets) at 5 p.m. on March 10.

Because of budget cuts since the Great Recession, CUNY has raised tuition, reduced classes, cut support for student services and laid off adjunct faculty.

Ten thousand DC 37 members who work at CUNY have gone without a raise for seven years. But the CUNY administration hasn't made a serious wage offer. The proposed cuts to NYC Health + Hospitals are equally alarming.

The governor seeks to shift $476 million in Medicaid spending to the city. The budget cut would significantly worsen the fiscal health of the city's public hospital system, which is already struggling with a staggering $500 million deficit.

The root of the hospital system's troubles is that the public and non-public safety net hospitals in the state serve a disproportionate number of indigent and uninsured patients without receiving the corresponding Medicaid funding support from Albany.

The city's public hospital system cares for 60 percent of the indigent and uninsured patients in the state. Yet it only receives 3 percent of the $3.5 billion that Albany allocates each year for those patients. We are seeking legislation that would change the funding formula to make the state's allocation of Medicaid funds more equitable.

DC 37 members who work at the nation's largest municipal public healthcare are dedicated to ensuring that NYC Health + Hospitals fulfills its mission to care for the city's most needy residents.

NYC Health + Hospitals cares for 1.4 million patients each year. The $1 billion twin budget cuts threaten NYC Health + Hospitals' ability to meet its mission and would make CUNY less affordable for needy students, who face five more years of tuition hikes if the $485 million in spending cuts make it through the budget approval process.

We cannot allow this budget betrayal to happen.