THE FEDS DELIVER
Finally OK $1B in city hosp COVID funding
The city’s public hospital system is on track to get a nearly $1 billion shot in the arm to cover its heroic COVID crisis work — but only after the feds tried for months to skimp on the bill, a pair of New York lawmakers said Wednesday.
The Biden administration agreed to boost its reimbursement from about $260 million, succumbing to months of political pressure, according to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-Bronx).
In a triumphant news conference at Lincoln Hospital in the Bronx, Schumer said he and his colleagues had aggressively pressed the Federal Emergency Management Agency to secure the funding for NYC Health + Hospitals, the entity that oversees the city’s 11 public hospitals.
“We met and fought and fought,” Schumer declared. “Today we are happy to announce that FEMA has relented.”
He said the money was owed after the system dramatically expanded its bed capacity to meet overwhelming needs in the terrible spring of 2020.
“During COVID, these folks went all out,” Schumer said of the network’s workers. “This hospital system stood tall.”
Health + Hospitals first filed a reimbursement request with FEMA in October 2020 for roughly $900 million in expenses related to hiring extra staff and expanding capacity to treat coronavirus patients.
But, as reported by the Daily News in June, FEMA initially only agreed to cover less than a third of the request, claiming the remaining portions were ineligible because Health + Hospitals had conflated regular hospital expenses with emergency coronavirus operations.
Torres said the federal agency had gotten bogged down in “bureaucratic reasoning” that “ignored the reality that we all saw.” In the early days of the pandemic, coronavirus touched the whole health care system.
Schumer, Torres, other local lawmakers and Health + Hospitals officials pleaded with FEMA to reverse its decision — and their efforts proved successful, with the federal agency agreeing to send the system a check for $620 million, according to Schumer’s office. That covers almost the entirety of Health + Hospital’s original reimbursement claim, when combined with the previously obligated funds.
Health + Hospitals told FEMA that additional expenses could bring the total to about $1 billion, Schumer’s office said.
FEMA declined to comment. The federal agency’s initial refusal to pick up Health + Hospitals’ whole pandemic tab sparked an outcry in New York.
Politicians like Schumer and Torres said FEMA’s explanation for denying most of Health + Hospitals’ claim didn’t make sense because there was no way for the system to differentiate between regular operations and coronavirus operations during last year’s pandemic peak.
Dr. Mitchell Katz, Health + Hospitals’ CEO, also warned in a letter to FEMA Administrator Dianne Criswell over the summer that the system was finding itself in a precarious financial situation that could jeopardize hospital service because it had assumed the feds would cover coronavirus emergency costs.
“Recall that NYC was the first American city to experience the rapid and devastating COVID-19 spread, so there was no rule book or script to follow,” Katz wrote to Criswell at the time. “We in NYC and at H+H, in particular, were setting the standards for the nation.”
Mayor de Blasio, who also visited Lincoln Hospital on Wednesday to revel in the good news, said he remembered “every minute of March and April 2020,” when the city faced its darkest days of the pandemic.
“H+H hospitals were the tip of the spear,” he said at the South Bronx medical center, which was crushed during the crisis.
At the time, the city believed that the federal government would back up costs incurred in the mad dash to save lives, the mayor added.
“But we now know the money wouldn’t have been there if it wasn’t for Sen. Chuck Schumer and Congress member Ritchie Torres,” de Blasio said. “They saved the day.”
Still, Schumer offered a dose of appreciation to Washington in the news conference.
“The bottom line is: Today we want to thank FEMA,” Schumer said. “We got this done.”