The brewing feud between Governor Steamroller and the health care unions has taken another twist this weekend. Al Sharpton has joined forces with 1199 S.E.I.U. and the Greater New York Hospital Association to fight against the new health care budget proposed by Spitzer. The Reverend has lent his name to a mass mailer and spoke for a radio blitz that claims the new plan short changes the poor and the cuts are in the worst place possible. Or are they?
From the radio spot:
“With H.M.O.’s raking in excessive profits to the tune of $5 million a day in New York alone, it’s unreal to me that Governor Spitzer would pick on underpaid nurses and health care workers in order to meet his bottom line,” Mr. Sharpton, left, said in a statement.
In the radio ad, he says nurses “are being forgotten in Governor Spitzer’s budget."
The Governor's spokeswoman Christine Anderson immediately fired back that the budget would actually provide historic increases for education funding and insurance for every child. Spitzer himself wrote a piece for the NY Post to explain his position.
From the Op-Ed:
We face this crisis because special interests - not the needs of patients - have guided health-care policy decisions in Albany.
My plan for health-care reform would transform our health care system into one that puts the needs of patients first.
I would make insurance available to every child in New York right away and reduce the overall number of uninsured by half over four years. I would not cut Medicaid benefits. I would increase public-health funding to prevent diabetes, obesity, asthma, lead poisoning, HIV/AIDS and cancer. I would use the state's bargaining power to cut the price it pays for prescription drug and improve care for seniors.
These proposals would be funded in part by holding down the growth in the bloated subsidies the state now provides to hospitals with relatively few Medicaid patients.
Not surprisingly, Big Health Care has objected to this proposal. They claim the most vulnerable patients and hospitals would be hurt.
This is nonsense. The total impact on hospitals would be less than 1 percent of total operating revenues. For the sake of comparison, hospital revenues have increased by an annual average of 7 percent over the past four years.
The Governor also proposed funding 20 more low-income area hospitals and fighting the unchecked billions of dollars that flow through the system. It seems that much like the NY state legislature, people are getting pissed off at Spitzer for shaking up the system that has been so miserably entrenched for far too long.
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