Last year, a coalition of state legislators from Queens ushered through both houses a bill that would mandate a 90-day public comment period if the state wanted to shutter a hospital.

But Gov. David Paterson vetoed the bill, known as the Hospital Closure Planning Act and despite prodding from the Queens delegation, the Legislature did not override the veto.

Now however, Manhattan politicians are in an uproar over the likely shuttering of the emergency room at St. Vincent’s Hospital, a closure that may happen without the kind of public notice that the Legislature’s bill promised.    

Queens politicos can not help but say, “I told you so.”

“There was no question in our minds that St. John’s and Mary Immaculate were not going to be the last hospitals to close,” said Queens Assembly Member Rory Lancman, who sponsored the bill after those two hospitals, plus another in Queens, closed. “We did it so another community wouldn't have to go through what we went through in Queens, which was groping around in the dark to see how the services that were lost with the closures would be made up.”

Lancman’s called for the state, before it approved a closure, to hold public hearings and put out a written report about how the community would be affected and how hospitals would handle the extra strain on their service.

At the time, Paterson said such a process would be ineffective and needlessly expensive in a tight budget year.

The local Manhattan elected officials who represent the area—including respective Assembly and Senate Health Committee chairs Dick Gottfried and Tom Duane—have submitted a letter to state Health Commissioner Richard Daines and Paterson asking for exactly what Lancman’s bill would have provided. The letter laid out a plan for community hearings and a longer timeframe.

“This is not the time for rash decisions, but prudence,” the letter said. “We strongly urge DOH to immediately stop the current course of action and create a public process to provide for a fully informed decision, allowing for consideration of other proposals and active community involvement.”

Under the current proposal for St. Vincent’s, which is on the brink of bankruptcy, it would partner with Continuum Health Services, which owns St. Luke’s and Roosevelt hospitals, and its emergency room and inpatient services would be eliminated. 

Continuum’s plan for St. Vincent’s would leave Manhattan’s West Side without an emergency room below 58th Street, a prospect they said was unacceptable.

According to state law, hospitals must notify Department of Health at least 90 days in advance of any proposed closure. The Health Commissioner must approve of any closure after waiting for the agency to examine its impact. There is no provision however to notify the surrounding community.

The story of St. Vincent’s takeover broke in the press this week, earlier than intended by the hospital or the state, leading to a public outcry.

Gottfried said it was pure luck that the public was getting a chance to pressure the state to react to their concerns.

“A public process is important because different people will analyze the same data in different ways,” said Gottfried.  “It's one thing for someone in the Health Department to say ‘well, patients will just go from over here to over there, that doesn’t look like such a big deal.’ But the patients might look at that statement and feel very differently about it.” 

However, state Health Department spokesperson Claudia Hutton said that the public’s expectations for hearings and detailed information were unrealistic in a private health marketplace.

“Ideally, no [hospital] would ever close, or if they did, there would be so much time … that every household would get a letter from the hospital saying this is what we’re doing, and this is who’s going to take over the services. But that’s not how business works,” Hutton explained. “If you have 150 people come and say ‘I love this hospital, this is where my baby was born, they saved my dad,’ that doesn't change the fact that if the hospital cannot keep itself financially viable, then the state has a problem.”