Dr. Bill’s housecall

Jump to no conclusions that Mayor de Blasio traded government quos for donors’ quids via the Campaign for One New York, his fundraising venture probed by U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara and Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance. Also leave room for the possibility that de Blasio has gotten hammered by a sudden new emphasis on enforcing election laws that were long disregarded.

But do consider evidence that, at times, the mayor’s fealty to donors warped his priorities.

De Blasio included in the budget he proposed this week $180 million annually to prop up the public Health + Hospitals system, described by the mayor as “crucial to this city . . . the foundation of all public health care.”

A “long-term problem,” he called the public hospitals’ money traumas, exacerbated by unintended consequences of Obamacare. Yet only this week, past the halfway mark of his term, did he at last offer even a sketch of how to cut costs and raise funds.

“It’s time for us all to come to grips with it,” de Blasio remarked. No — the time to come to grips when he stepped into City Hall in Jan. 2014.

Instead, while public hospitals bled money, de Blasio went gangbusters to salvage Brooklyn’s private Long Island College Hospital, a ward of the state after an operator had declared the hemorrhaging patient beyond saving.

As candidate for mayor, de Blasio got arrested protesting LICH’s impending closure. Two months into his mayoralty, he trumpeted a settlement that kept alive hope LICH could stay open as a “transcendent moment for health care in New York City.”

Two weeks later, Local 1199, a health-care union dominant in private hospitals, including LICH, contributed $250,000 to the Campaign for One New York.

Although the hospital was doomed when no bidder submitted a feasible operating concept, de Blasio used the Campaign for One New York to then round up local support for Plan B: a freestanding, privately operated emergency room amid redevelopment of the hospital’s prime real estate.

In June 2014, the campaign mailed to thousands of neighbors a letter signed by a local civic leader who had been “asked by Mayor de Blasio to share my views.”

He touted the fallback plan for a clinic as a win “much better than we expected.” It meant a reprieve for Local 1199 jobs, too. De Blasio’s campaign to prop up a single private health-care facility that served an affluent area, while leaving the public system unattended, contradicts his claims that the Campaign for One New York only pushed two issues of citywide reach, universal pre-K and affordable housing.

The LICH circus proved a distraction from the urgent project of rescuing Health + Hospitals — and poses questions for Bharara and Vance. For example:

The state ultimately chose a developer named Fortis to build housing on the site along with an emergency facility, a plan complicated by pursuit of zoning changes. How did Fortis come to hire Hilltop Solutions — whose New York office is led by Campaign for One New York chair and de Blasio campaign manager Bill Hyers — to sell its development plan to the neighborhood?