NY Times:  Rememberd this when the government says we don't have enough
beds during a lockdown for a health emergency.  As I recall, this is a 
TEN STORY hospital with a Kosher kitchen.

New York Will Allow Beth Israel Hospital to Close The health facility’s
potential closure had been contentious following the shuttering of other
hospitals serving Lower Manhattan.


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The round facade of Mount Sinai seen flanked by leafy trees.  Mount Sinai,
Beth Israel’s parent hospital system, has argued that the facility is
losing so much money that it threatens the entire system.Credit...José
A. Alvarado Jr. for The New York Times Joseph Goldstein By Joseph
Goldstein July 26, 2024 The New York State Department of Health has
agreed to allow a major hospital in Manhattan to close, which would
leave many downtown residents farther away from emergency medical care.

The fate of the hospital, Mount Sinai Beth Israel, has been up in the
air since 2016, when its parent hospital system first announced a closure
plan. The hospital survived for years, kept alive by community activists
who filed lawsuits to keep it open, as well as by the coronavirus
pandemic, which filled its beds with critically ill patients.

Over the past year, however, the parent hospital system, Mount Sinai,
renewed its push to close Beth Israel, claiming the facility was losing
so much money that the losses threatened the entire hospital system,
one of the city’s largest.

On Thursday the State Health Department, which evaluates hospital closure
proposals, said that it had approved Mount Sinai’s plan to close Beth
Israel, with several conditions.

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The conditions are aimed at ensuring that nearby hospitals aren’t
overwhelmed by the increase of patients expected after Beth Israel
closes. The hospital, at 16th Street and First Avenue, treated just under
50,000 patients last year, and handles about 6 percent of all emergency
room visits in Manhattan. Once it closes, many of those patients will
most likely land at Bellevue or NYU Langone Health, two hospitals both
several blocks up First Avenue from Beth Israel.

The Health Department said Beth Israel must fund an expansion of the
emergency room at Bellevue, the flagship of the city’s public hospital
system. Another condition is that Beth Israel must run an urgent care
center, open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, for three months.

The state’s decision removes a major hurdle standing in the way of
Mount Sinai’s closure, but for the moment, the hospital must stay open:
It still faces a lawsuit challenging the closing, and a judge has ordered
the facility not to reduce its medical services in the meantime. But many
doctors and nurses have left over the past year to find more secure jobs
elsewhere. At times, care has suffered and patients have been rerouted
to other hospitals because Beth Israel is no longer able to respond to
strokes and some other medical emergencies.

A spokesman for the Mount Sinai hospital system, Loren Riegelhaupt, said
in a statement that Beth Israel would remain open and accept patients,
for now.

Beth Israel was founded in 1889, initially as a dispensary serving mainly
Jewish immigrants on the Lower East Side. It grew into a major Manhattan
hospital, but has struggled in recent years.

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The past 20 years have seen the closure of two large nearby hospitals:
Cabrini in the Gramercy Park neighborhood and St. Vincent’s in
Greenwich Village.

In a letter to the state health commissioner on Thursday, a longtime
health activist, Mark Hannay, wrote that allowing the closure to go
forward risked leaving “a dangerous gap in availability of emergency
care in Lower Manhattan.”

Joseph Goldstein covers health care in New York for The Times,
following years of criminal justice and police reporting. More about
Joseph Goldstein