Doctor, heal the hospitals

Welcome to New York, Dr. Mitchell Katz, for your first day on the job as boss of the city’s public hospital system, with nothing bigger on your plate than, oh, saving from collapse 11 teetering-on-the-brink health care facilities that cost $7 billion a year, employ 47,000 and serve 1.4 million a year more.

No pressure. You got this. Your sunny California disposition, your impressive record in L.A. getting care to the neediest among us, will serve you and your new city well.

But mark our words: Success in New York will come only by demanding a profound, long-delayed transformation of the medical centers and clinics of NYC Health + Hospitals — finding not only fresh uses for increasingly archaic facilities but also honing the purpose of the institutions to fill urgent needs private players won’t.

(And, psst — don’t let the mayor, who’s been known to play hospital politics, push you around and off track.) The grim vital statistics: Health + Hospitals is on life support — propped up by hundreds of millions of dollars a year in subsidies from the City of New York, and still facing down deficits yawning to $1.8 billion by 2020.

Patients, many newly equipped with health insurance thanks to the Affordable Care Act, which is living and breathing for now at least, are discovering they can choose other providers for health care, and don’t necessarily need inpatient stays following surgery and other procedures.

That leaves the hulking city-owned hospital buildings serving fewer and fewer patients with each passing year, with some hospitals — conspicuously North Central Bronx and Metropolitan, in Manhattan — with wards of empty beds.

Mayor de Blasio dealt H+H a worse than lousy hand. First, he rallied to save a private Brooklyn hospital tied to a major labor union donor while virtually ignoring the public hospitals’ plight.

Then he insisted on no building closures and no layoffs, tying hands that must now be unshackled to perform lifesaving surgery.

Which is to say: Creatively reinvent facilities. Convert some full-service hospitals into modern clinics. Find smart uses for underutilized space. And when people are getting paid too much to do too little, let them go.

Don’t take our word for it. De Blasio’s former deputy mayor in charge of the hospitals and then their board chairwoman, Lilliam Barrios-Paoli, called their financial plight “really, really dire,” and added: “If they continue what they are doing and change nothing, they will not survive.”

All of New York City needs H+H to thrive. It is our first line of defense against epidemics like Ebola. Vast swaths of the city — most especially immigrants and the mentally ill — rely upon it for daily clinical care.

Without it, they’d flood other hospitals’ emergency rooms, or let sickness to body and mind go increasingly untreated.

Give us the shot, Dr. Katz. Even if it’ll hurt a bit.