Keeping the Community in Health Planning

Last week, the Commission on the Public’s Health System (CPHS) and NYLPI collaborated to comment on proposed legislation that would streamline the certificate of need process—the administrative procedure healthcare providers generally must go through in order to increase or modify their infrastructure (e.g., equipment, buildings and parking lots), or services they provide.  While a more efficient health planning process is a laudable goal, our organizations believe that it should not come at the expense of further removing community stakeholders—the very people who use the services—from the healthcare planning process.

Instead of simply deregulating the process even more, CPHS and NYLPI have called for three recommendations to amend the proposed legislation to still achieve efficiencies, but give communities a continued role in the process.  Our recommendations were not only made with an eye toward ensuring that community stakeholders have a voice in healthcare decision-making, but also that the State Department of Health is well-situated to strategically allocate healthcare resources in the most equitable way possible, especially for medically under-served communities of color and immigrant communities.  Read our memo and stay tuned for further developments.

Making Separate and Unequal Illegal

For those of you who’ve been following our campaign to eliminate separate and unequal health care delivery in New York City’s academic medical centers, we’ve got some good news!  This morning legislation was introduced in the New York State Senate that would make it explicitly clear that private academic medical centers in New York City must provide care to all patients in the same place at the same time.  In other words, they are not allowed to steer Medicaid patients to one section of the hospital, where they provide them with lesser quality of care from privately insured patients, who are seen in another part of the hospital.  To read the text of the bill, click here.  A clearer summary of and justification for the legislation can be viewed here, in what is called the “sponsor memo.”  We will keep you posted as this campaign progresses!