POLS PUSH MED EQUITY
City Hall hopefuls seek better access to care and vaccinations for people of color, who have been hit hardest during the pandemic
Around the country, COVID has hit communities of color hardest, both inflicting new devastation and highlighting bitter, longstanding truths about the public health system.
While Black and Hispanic New Yorkers have died at nearly twice the rate of white and Asian people, the city’s vaccination efforts have left many people of color behind — Black New Yorkers make up about a quarter of the city’s population, but had received just 11% of shots as of late January; Hispanics, who comprise 29% of the population, got 15% of doses.
Mayor de Blasio has promised the city will administer 5 million vaccinations by June. The small army of candidates running to replace him are outlining steps to finish up the job after he’s out of office in January 2022, and have proposed a range of ways to fix the ailing public health system.
With less than 100 days to go before the June Democratic primary, which is likely to determine the next mayor, the mantle of public health leader remains up for grabs.
“We need a public health mayor who can have a city Department of Health and in some ways, Health and Hospitals [department] ... to work with communities on real community planning, real health impact assessments and equity,” said Anthony Feliciano, director of the Commission on the Public’s Health System, a citywide advocacy group.
While the volume of drug supplies — cause of nationwide woes in the vaccination effort — is out of the hands of the mayor, candidates largely agreed that the city can do better on spreading the word and winning the trust of New Yorkers who may be wary of the public health system.
Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams has called for wider eligibility for vaccinations and an easy-to-understand color-coded system to let New Yorkers know when they can get a shot. City Comptroller Scott Stringer has proposed steps including mandatory paid time off for vaccine appointments and creation of a task force to oversee the drug supply chain.
“We need to be deploying mobile units, we need to be setting up popups in religious institutions,” Dianne Morales, one of the most progressive candidates in the race, told the Daily News. “The local pillars of communities need to be engaged in outreach and actual distribution of the vaccine.
“We still haven’t prioritized saving Black and Brown lives,” added Morales, former CEO of the nonprofit Phipps Neighborhoods. “We still haven’t prioritized taking care of the people who we know have made it possible for the city to keep operating at the height of the pandemic.”
President Biden recently said there will be enough doses for every adult in the country by May. But even once most of the city has been vaccinated, that of course won’t mean the end of the Big Apple’s health care woes.
Thousands of New Yorkers have lost health insurance along with their jobs since the start of the pandemic. Nationwide, about one in five Black and Hispanic households reported being unable to get health care during the outbreak. And Gov. Cuomo has proposed slashing $473 million from the city’s public hospital system amid budget shortfalls.
“Millions of New Yorkers rely on Health + Hospitals and our safety-net hospitals for care — and most of them are people of color. And that system is at constant risk of financial disaster,” noted Adams, who promised to boost funding for health services for low-income New Yorkers.
One of the boldest proposals in the mayoral race, from candidate Shaun Donovan, is to create a citybacked health insurance option for
New Yorkers including undocumented people.
“The best way to do this is a national public option,” he told The News. “My concern is that particularly undocumented folks are being left behind. It is absolutely better to have a city option than no option for those folks.”
He didn’t put a price tag on the undertaking, but predicted the city would save in the long term by helping people get care before they end up in emergency rooms.
Maya Wiley, a former top legal adviser to de Blasio, says she would bargain for health coverage for hundreds of thousands of uninsured New Yorkers. Former Sanitation Commissioner Kathryn Garcia has made similar promises.
“People don’t just need access to insurance, they need access to health care services in their neighborhood,” she noted in a statement.
Like a number of other candidates, Garcia wants to boost primary care in underserved neighborhoods.
She promised to invest in community health centers, increase access to emergency care and fight any proposal to close hospitals.
Donovan has promised to put services including good schools, transit and health care within a short walk of all New Yorkers’ homes.
“We should absolutely be working side by side with all the health care providers and insurers to demand greater equity,” said Donovan, a former top official in the Bloomberg and Obama administrations.
Entrepreneur Andrew Yang, who came out on top in a recent poll about the candidates, wants to expand the city’s existing network of “Neighborhood Action Centers” beyond East Harlem, Brownsville, Brooklyn, and the Bronx neighborhood of Tremont.
“We need a Neighborhood Action Center in Queens, one of the most diverse areas,” he said at a recent candidates’ forum hosted by the Community Service Society of New York. “That would be, to me, one of the first things we need to do.”
Former Citigroup Vice Chairman Ray McGuire has yet to put out a health platform. But he suggested he’d take the same approach to health challenges that he’s suggested for other problems, namely, calling on the private sector.
“I would incentivize the development of primary-care facilities within the boroughs so that the people in the boroughs have a primary-care physician,” he said.
The next mayor will inherit a Health Department that’s been demoralized since de Blasio transferred key pandemic responsibilities like tracing COVID cases from it to NYC Health + Hospitals.
Stringer said at the forum that he wants to “merge” the departments. Asked for clarification, his spokesman pointed to his website saying Stringer wants to improve coordination between the organizations.
Adams, who’s viewed as a front-runner alongside Stringer, said the idea “should be evaluated.”
The candidates have different takes on what it would mean to succeed at improving New York’s health. Improving life expectancy is one possible gauge, according to Donovan.
“We live in a city where Black mothers are eight times more likely to die giving birth than white mothers, the life expectancy in Brownsville is a full decade less than in Midtown, and the infant mortality rate in East Flatbush is 11 times higher than Greenwich Village. And that’s to say nothing of the fact that Black and Brown New Yorkers died from COVID at twice the rate of their white neighbors,” Yang said in a statement.
“If we’re looking to measure the city’s success in ending racial disparities, those are all places I would look to see how we’re faring,” he added.