Why health care workers are rallying in Albany

This month marks the third anniversary of the first COVID case confirmed in New York State. Today, despite a sense of normalcy returning to our everyday lives, our health care system remains in a state of deep crisis. Safety-net hospitals are on the brink of closure, emergency rooms are understaffed and overcrowded, nursing home residents face interminably long wait times for bedside care, and home care services are becoming ever harder to come by. Yet Gov. Hochul’s budget proposal reads as if the greatest health crisis in generations never happened and includes significant cuts to services that would impact our state’s most vulnerable — seniors, people with disabilities, and low-income families.

New York’s health care workforce is burnt out and depleted, and caregivers are more short-staffed than ever. The rigors of working on the pandemic’s frontlines have had a devastating impact on the mental and physical well-being of those who provide care, and too many have left the industry entirely.

Our state’s leaders must take urgent action to rebuild and reinvest in health care. This is why tomorrow, some 15,000 health care workers — representing nearly every job title, type of institution, and community in New York — will march and rally at the Capitol in Albany. Our demand: invest an additional $2.5 billion in health care in the budget and close the Medicaid coverage gap. With an $8.7 billion budget surplus, there is simply no reason why this shouldn’t be done especially given the lifeand-death consequences.

It has been decades since New York’s health care workers have mobilized in such numbers, and it’s because for us and the people we care for, the urgency of the moment couldn’t be greater. The governor and our legislative leadership in Albany must take action now to resolve the health care funding shortfalls and ensure access to care for those in need. Unfortunately, the governor’s budget does the opposite, completely failing to recognize the severity of this crisis.

Medicaid is a lifeline for millions of New Yorkers. It provides health coverage for most seniors needing nursing home and home health care. It covers approximately 40% of children and 50% of people with disabilities in New York. Nearly half of all pregnant women in our state rely on Medicaid for the delivery of their babies.

Medicaid allows our most vulnerable communities to access essential health services, but it is woefully underfunded. In fact, New York faces one of the highest reimbursement rate shortfalls in the nation: for every dollar worth of care that a Medicaid enrollee receives, the health care provider is only reimbursed 61 cents. This places a tremendous cost burden on our health system, especially for safety-net hospitals serving lower-income communities that don’t specialize in the types of lucrative procedures and surgeries as more affluent hospitals do.

The governor’s budget falls significantly short in a number of respects.

A proposed 5% increase to Medicaid rates is entirely undercut by changes to a drug pricing program called 340b, an important source of support for safety net providers. The budget includes $700 million in cuts to safety-net institutions at a time their resources are already stretched too thin.

Home care workers, who just last year won a major victory raising their minimum pay to $3 an hour above the state minimum wage, would see this achievement overturned, and again fall back to a minimum wage level. Consumer-directed personal caregivers would have their pay reduced by $4.09 an hour, or about 20%, in a devastating blow to their livelihoods and to the ability of consumers to recruit the caregivers they need.

New Yorkers cannot abide an austere health care budget that continues to expand the gap between Medicaid funding, which didn’t see a single increase between 2008 and 2021, and the actual cost of care. To address the health care crisis and set our system on a path to recovery, we must instead raise Medicaid rates by 10% and reject the severe cuts to lowpaid caregivers’ jobs. We must secure the services and care that millions of vulnerable New Yorkers rely on. The one-house budget proposals from Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie and Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins make these commitments, and they must be fulfilled in the final budget.

It wasn’t too long ago that New Yorkers banged on pots and pans every evening to honor and celebrate the heroism of frontline health care workers who were risking their lives during the worst of the pandemic. These same health care workers continue to face immense challenges to deliver the type of care their patients deserve, and on Tuesday, it will be them making the noise.