Sick about Blaz’s pick
MANY PEOPLE in Brooklyn think Mayor de Blasio’s appointment of Stanley Brezenoff is bad medicine.
Brezenoff, as former CEO of Continuum Health Industries, fed Long Island College Hospital a slow poison that is killing it. Now de Blasio names Brezenoff as a special unpaid adviser on 152 municipal labor contracts left unresolved by Mayor Bloomberg.
“Brezenoff is a poster boy for what the late great Jack Newfield called the Permanent Government,” says one doctor who has worked at LICH for 30 years and lives in the community. “He made his political bones in the Koch administration as the head of Health and Hospital Corp.”
This doctor says he has known de Blasio for a long time.
“I enjoy eating a dish of macaroni with Bill,” he says. “But it made me physically ill on New Year’s Day to learn he’d appointed Brezenoff, who wants LICH dead, to any post.”
De Blasio spokesman Wiley Norvel wants people in Brooklyn to relax, saying, “Stan Brezenoff will serve as an unpaid adviser on labor relations with the administration.”
But Brezenoff’s mere presence in the new administration causes worry. They remember that after the Koch administration, Brezenoff took his political Rolodex into the private sector as CEO of Maimonides Hospital in Brooklyn. A lot of his political cronies worked for him.
Then Brezenoff became CEO of Continuum, a network of hospitals with Beth Israel as the mother ship and satellites like St. Luke’s and Roosevelt Hospitals, New York Eye and Ear, and LICH.
Under Brezenoff, the Brooklyn Heights hospital began to hemorrhage red ink. A $140 million bequest to the hospital by a Brooklyn Heights couple named Donald and Mildred Othmer vanished into Continuum. Community activists say Brezenoff wanted to close LICH. Many feared he’d sell the land for condo development. The staff and community protested.
Then in 2010, Brezenoff used his vast political influence to persuade the state, under then-Gov. David Paterson, to subsume LICH into SUNY-Downstate Medical Center, absorbing $300 million in red ink. Meanwhile, in a piece of political sleight of hand even Boss Tweed would envy, Brezenoff’s Continuum stayed on to do $50 million a year in medical billing.
What makes Brezenoff’s appointment so disturbing is that de Blasio was the loudest mayoral candidate backing LICH activists trying to save their vital hospi- tal from Continuum-SUNY Downstate euthanasia. In his inaugural speech, de Blasio promised to “stem the tide of hospital closures.”
At that part of his address, de Blasio should have been pointing his finger directly at Stanley Brezenoff. Instead, he’d appointed Brezenoff as a special labor contract adviser to First Deputy Mayor Anthony Shorris 12 hours earlier.
Some people who know Brezenoff’s modus operandi fear that once inside City Hall, his influence could spread like a political pox. De Blasio really needs to research Brezenoff’s role in trying to kill LICH. He can start by listening to some of the people who have been saving lives there for decades and have spent the past five years trying to save LICH from Brezenoff and SUNY Downstate.
“I voted for de Blasio mainly because of his promise to save LICH,” says Dr. John Romanelli, former head of the LICH medical staff, who happens to be my physician. “Instead, he hires the guy the Jedi Knights trying to save LICH nicknamed Darth Vader. Brezenoff totally mismanaged LICH, and then dumped it on the state, $300 million in debt. When Continuum continued losing money, Mount Sinai Hospital bought it and gave Brezenoff a golden parachute. Now de Blasio brings Brezenoff back into city government? Scary.”
Repeated requests to speak to Brezenoff went unanswered.
“Mayor de Blasio has fought alongside this community,” de Blasio spokesman Norvel said, “and will continue to fight alongside it, to protect its access to vital health care at LICH.”
Whether that means as a full-scale hospital or an urgent-care center remains to be seen. But I find it hard to believe that de Blasio, who got arrested on a protest line to save LICH and received the New York State Nurses Association’s first-ever mayoral endorsement, would go along with pulling the plug on this crucial community hospital.
That said, many people in Brooklyn think that Brezenoff in City Hall is bad medicine.