Standing Up for Safety Net Hospitals
With state and local budget crises forcing cuts in health care at a time when the need is greatest because of the economy, CIR residents across the country have been fighting back by raising their voices on behalf of low-income patients and the safety-net hospitals they depend on.
Draconian state Medicaid cuts brought more than 30 CIR members from Boston Medical Center and Cambridge Hospital out on a bitter cold afternoon to protest. The “Put Patients First” rally in front of the Massachusetts State House on January 29, 2009 drew more than 800 people — hospital employees, administrators, elected officials and patients. They gathered to protest clinic closures, staff cuts and the closing of important services at the two hospitals.
“At the Cambridge Health Alliance, we provide 270,000 primary care outpatient visits every year,” said Dr. Zarpash Babar, PGY 3 in Internal Medicine, who spoke on behalf of CIR. “Forty-two percent of our patients speak a language other than English, and we are the largest single provider of mental health care in the state of Massachusetts.”
“Budget cuts to safety-net hospitals like Cambridge and BMC leave patients without care, and it condemns many of the mentally ill to homelessness and prison,” said Dr. Babar.
Protesters demanded that Governor Deval Patrick designate funds from the federal economic recovery legislation to restore the cuts to BMC and Cambridge. Last fall, the governor unilaterally cut the Medicaid program, and 70% of those cuts were aimed at the state’s two most important safety-net hospitals. Also speaking at the rally was Dr. Thea James, a former CIR leader and now an Emergency Medicine attending at Boston Medical Center. She spoke about the history and role of safety-net hospitals.
On the other coast, CIR members at San Francisco General Hospital joined a new Coalition to Save Public Health in response to Mayor Gavin Newsom’s massive mid-year cuts to the Department of Public Health’s budget. Over twenty unions, social service organizations and faith based groups have come together to fight these cuts that will gut the vital services of San Francisco’s neediest populations.
At SFGH, the cuts are leading to the downgrading of RNs to LVNs in many parts of the hospital as well as eliminating the clerks in areas where residents engage in a daily struggle to deliver quality patient care.
Residents also mobilized online to ensure that additional federal funding for Medicaid would be included in the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act, also known as the stimulus bill. CIR members emailed their members of Congress to describe the patients they see every day and how cuts to Medicaid would hurt them precisely at the time when they needed care the most. Their persistence was rewarded as the final version of the bill contained $87 billion in additional federal funding for Medicaid. Click here for more details on stimulus funds directed towards health care.