By Cynthia Koons
“It will take much more than a Band-Aid to heal these cuts the governor is proposing,” Meng said. “Among the $3 billion in cuts are $20 million slated for the 22nd Assembly District. These cuts are aimed at the most vulnerable in our community: the elderly and our children.” According to Meng, the programs most affected by the cuts include Family and Children's Health Plus, the state's insurance plan for low-income residents; workforce recruitment and retention programs; drug insurance for the elderly; breast and cervical treatment programs; and Medicaid buy-in plans for the working disabled.”Lives will be at risk,” Meng said. “We would like Gov. Pataki to stop the cuts.”A spokesman for the governor's budget office, Peter Constantakes, said the state has to control Medicaid spending because if reform is not implemented, Medicaid alone could end up consuming more than 50 percent of the state's budget costs.”To address the increasing pressure Medicaid is putting on local property taxpayers, Gov. Pataki's executive budget outlines a plan to restructure our health care system, to make it stronger, better and more effective while also providing relief to taxpayers and local governments,” Constantakes said.He added that the governor had included $1.1 billion in “cost containment” in the Medicaid budget, but would be increasing Medicaid spending by $300 million in the budget this year.In protesting the potential cuts, Meng was joined by leaders from 1199 SEIU, the health-care worker's union that represents the employees who work at Flushing Hospital. They worry that their facility may suffer the same fate as St. Joseph's in Flushing, which began a phased closure last year after its parent company, St. Vincent Catholic Medical Center, said it could no longer afford to maintain the hospital.”I myself have been knocking on doors in Westchester County since Feb. 7,” Beverly Gordon of 1199 SEIU said. “Gov. Pataki's budget has been touted as Medicaid, but it's not.”Gordon estimated that she and other opponents of the health-care cuts have stopped at 100,000 New Yorker's houses to ask them to make a plea to the governor.In the hands of the dozen people gathered for the protest were 700 cards from New York residents who signed a petition asking Pataki not to cut funding for health care.The protesters stood in the shadow of Flushing Hospital, which is poised to lose $4.8 million in state funding if the budget is passed in its current form.This comes less than a year after another Flushing hospital, St. Joseph's, announced it was closing its doors because its beds were underutilized. St. Vincent Catholic Medical Centers, which operated the hospital, relocated some of St. Joseph's services to the company's other Queens hospitals in Elmhurst and Jamaica.Mary Fisher, a member of Community Board 8, worries that the same thing could happen to Flushing Hospital if the state does not prioritize health care.”We're not just a hospital that services for health-care needs,” said Fisher, who works at Flushing Hospital. “We serve cultural and language needs.”Flushing Hospital uses language devices to translate for the many non-English speaking patients who use the facility. If the $4.8 million cut slated for the hospital is implemented, officials said the medical center would no longer be able to maintain the same level of service for its patients.But the union plans to keep reaching out to New York state residents to make a plea to the governor to prevent the cuts from being signed into law.”We're going to knock on thousands of doors until we get what we're fighting for,” Gordon said.Reach reporter Cynthia Koons by e-mail at news@timesledger.com or call 718-229-0300, Ext. 141.
