THE COSTS OF CUOMO’S CUTS

To the Editors:

Michael Greenberg’s take on Andrew Cuomo’s political sleight of hand during the Covid pandemic, as well as the governor’s leadership failures and achievements [“Emergency Responder,” NYR, May 14], is welcome, but leaves out two important factors contributing greatly to New York’s current health care crisis. First, Cuomo has pushed for Medicaid cuts since he took office in 2011, and in the midst of the pandemic passed a state budget that included $400 million in reduced payments to hospitals, many of which rely on state aid to serve our very poorest citizens, who are hardest hit right now. Second, while news media like to focus on Cuomo’s seemingly heroic scramble to find temporary hospital beds during the crisis, few acknowledge that during his tenure he has both tacitly and actively approved very unpopular hospital closures and consolidations. In fact, New York has lost over 20,000 hospital beds and more than twenty hospitals statewide over the last two decades. Now more than ever, it is important to be crystal clear about the long-term negative effects of New York’s choosing draconian “cost-saving” austerity policies and public/private deals over its bottom-line responsibility to ensure lifesaving health care for those who require it most. Cuomo needs to tax New York’s millionaires and billionaires much more aggressively and stop ravaging the state’s already compromised public health care system if he really wants to defray public costs and help people. He also needs to be honest about his well-documented failure to tackle the systemic inequalities that plague our state, rather than seize on moments such as this to make political hay.

Terry Roethlein Long Island City, New York