Twelve of New York’s congressional Democrats are demanding that the federal government immediately reimburse the city’s public hospital system for at least $864 million in coronavirus-related emergency spending after the Daily News reported that the feds have dragged their feet on the payout for nearly a year.
The Democratic lawmakers, led by Rep. Ritchie Torres of the South Bronx, issued the demand in a letter dated Sunday to Federal Emergency Management Agency Administrator Deanne Criswell.
NYC Health + Hospitals — which oversees the city’s 11 public hospitals — first requested the reimbursement from Criswell’s staff in October.
As first reported by The News, FEMA rejected nearly all portions of the request, saying it could not process it until H+H better differentiated between coronavirus response-related costs and regular hospital expenses.
But Torres and the other lawmakers argue in their letter that it was impossible for city hospitals to make that distinction during the peak of the pandemic between March and August 2020, the period covered by H+H’s request.
During those chaotic months, city hospitals operated under the assumption that anyone seeking treatment “either carried or had the potential to spread the coronavirus,” making the divide between COVID and non-COVID operations indistinguishable, Torres and his colleagues wrote.
“We are disappointed that FEMA has refused NYC H+H’s claim that these expansions were due to COVID-19 by mandating an already burdened institution to provide superfluous documentation for funding eligibility,” reads the letter.
It was also signed by Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Gregory Meeks, Adriano Espaillat, Carolyn Maloney, Yvette Clarke, Tom Suozzi, Grace Meng, Nydia Velazquez, Jamaal Bowman, Jerrold Nadler and Hakeem Jeffries.
H+H seeks FEMA reimbursement for staffing, equipment and patient care efforts that were required to accommodate a surge of coronavirus cases at city hospitals, said an official of the public hospital system who spoke on condition of anonymity.
The system has received $266 million in FEMA reimbursements since last year, the official said. However, the total reimbursement request tops $1.1 billion, and H+H has furnished FEMA with complete documentation for $621 million of that, the official added.
FEMA chief Criswell suggested during a congressional hearing last month that H+H’s reimbursement request should not have been denied because “those types of costs are eligible.”
On that note, the Democrats wrote that FEMA’s own reimbursement protocol says the agency can cover non-COVID treatments costs “as necessary” if they are associated with pandemic-related hospital expenses.
H+H CEO and President Mitchell Katz sent a letter to Criswell on June 11 also asking FEMA to reconsider its rejection of the reimbursement request.
Katz wrote that the delay puts H+H is in a precarious financial situation and that its “safety net system” may soon be in jeopardy if FEMA doesn’t act soon.
New York has largely recovered from the darkest days of the pandemic, with infection rates remaining low as more and more people get vaccinated.
However, public health experts voice concern about the highly contagious delta variant of COVID-19 and warn that hospital systems like H+H may need to prepare for virus surges this fall.
Torres and the other New York pols suggested that adds another layer of urgency to their push for FEMA to promptly pick up H+H’s pandemic tab.
“We strongly urge FEMA to reimburse NYC H+H for the balance of its COVID-19 related expenditures,” they wrote.
