Hundreds of Nassau University Medical Center employees, first responders, patients, and community members rallied alongside the Hempstead Turnpike on Tuesday, Oct. 29, to support the immediate restoration of state funding to the center.
“Nassau University Medical Center serves many people with few to no benefits,” said a NUMC nurse from Levittown at the rally. In addition to speakers, there were also signs with slogans such as “Nassau needs NUMC,”
NUMC is Nassau County’s only publicly funded hospital. Based in East Meadow, they have been plagued by financial hardships throughout the decade. Hospital officials began raising concerns about NUMC’s viability in 2020 after losing a significant stream of funding, the Delivery System Reform Incentive Payment program.
A Newsday article in June detailed an outside audit of the system’s finances that found the center ran a deficit of $141.9 million in 2023. While $22 million less than in 2022, it remains the second-largest in the center’s history. In February, Newsday reported that Manhattan-based consulting firm Alvarez & Marsal found that NuHealth, the public benefit corporation that runs NUMC, had about $19 million in cash on hand—money that is liquid or unrestricted—and could have a negative balance as soon as April.
Matthew Bruderman and Megan Ryan, NuHealth interim president, CEO, and general counsel, requested $125 million from Gov. Kathy Hochul and state legislative leaders.
In March, Newsday reported that in response to the report and request, state Health Commissioner James McDonald demanded that the medical center must immediately conduct a professional and public search for its next CEO and create a detailed plan for reducing operating deficits to get $83 million in emergency state funding to stay open in a letter written to the hospital March 1.
While state officials have demanded a change in the hospital’s leadership, employees at the rally showed support for the current administration.
“This hospital belongs to its people. We want no state takeover,” Dr. Lennox Bryson, the NUMC Women’s Health Center’s director, said. “We ask for no change in leadership.”
NuHealth submitted a plan to cut deficits to McDonald on March 25 that included appealing insurance denials, restricting overtime and hiking the price of hospital services for the first time in over a decade.
But McDonald found this plan insufficient, saying it lacked a specific CEO for the hospital and a detailed 5-year strategy for reducing deficits, according to a Newsday article.
According to Ryan, if NUMC fails to receive state funding and shuts down close to 3,600 jobs—and thousands of lives—will be potentially at risk.
In addition, Nassau County backs more than $100 million in borrowing and would be responsible for the debt in a shutdown.
Ryan accused the Hochul administration of playing partisan politics with the hospital’s funding and demanded the state to step in. “There is a legal and moral obligation to fund us so we have no interruption in services. Nassau needs NUMC. Nassau needs all of you,” Ryan said.
