Call it the Hypocritical Oath.
First, with the 2011 hospital merger, they did great harm.
Now, with the recent vote to close Long Island College Hospital, the State University of New York is going to kill people.
Make no mistake: Close LICH, and people of Red Hook, Boerum Hill, Cobble Hill, Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn Heights will die.
“I picked up a cardiac arrest at 1:30 today on Hamilton Ave.,” a LICH ambulance driver named David Melina told me at a Thursday night rally to save LICH at the Kane St. Synagogue. “From the time we arrived, did an EKG, administered aspirin and nitro, forwarded his EKG by computer to the LICH docs who read it and prepared an OR, to the time they were opening an artery to save his life was seven minutes. If they close LICH we’d have to fight traffic up to Methodist in Park Slope or Lutheran out in Sunset Park. My opinion, add another 12-15 minutes, he wouldn’t have made it.”
Back in November 2009, when Gov. Cuomo was state attorney general, I wrote here about the doomed merger of LICH with SUNY Downstate Medical Center in which the state hospital would absorb $300 million in LICH red ink run up by a hospital consortium called Continuum Health Partners.
Continuum is run by a ruthless powerbroker named Stanley Brezenoff whose nickname at LICH is Darth Vader.
RELATED: LONG ISLAND COLLEGE HOSPITAL TO CLOSE: TRUSTEES
Brezenoff is a quintessential member of what muckraker Jack Newfield called The Permanent Government of New York. This professional politico was appointed by Mayor Ed Koch to run the city’s Health and Hospitals Corp., the feudal lord of a medical fiefdom within the city’s patronage-larded permanent government.
While in that post, Brezenoff compiled a Rolodex listing all the shadowy players in the city, state and federal medical rackets swimming in Medicaid and Medicare dollars.
When he left HHC, Brezenoff took his Rolodex with him and wound up heading Continuum, of which Beth Israel is the mothership with satellites like Roosevelt Hospital, New York Eye and Ear Infirmary, LICH and St. Luke’s Hospital.
Under Continuum, the once-profitable LICH ran up $300 million in debt from pure administrative malpractice. And then Brezenoff brokered the smelly SUNY Downstate merger, with state taxpayers absorbing the $300 million debt.
Brezenoff did not return a call I left for him.
Flash forward to December 2012, and Downstate President John (Skippy) Williams is still telling the LICH staff that all is well.
“LICH was hoping for a new cardiac cath lab from the $60 million in HEAL Grant money that is supposed to be used for capital improvements,” says Dr. John Romanelli, past president of the LICH medical staff. “But when Williams bought a new $2.5 million DaVinci operating room robot, everyone was enthused. He looked bold, decisive, like a real leader.”
