This comes from Yetta Kurland, one of the number one advocates for keeping hospitals open in lower Manhattan:

Dear Neighbor,

I hope you will join me on Thursday July 15th for the next St. Vincent's Omnibus Committee Meeting which will take place at 6:30pm at PS 41 located at 116 West 11th Street.

Last month we tried without much success to engage the Committee in a discussion on how we could get a hospital at the St. Vincent's site. While we were unsuccessful in having at that discussion last month, the Chair Brad Hoylman assured us that he would be willing to have that discussion with us in the future. It is our hopes that this will happen this Thursday.

Please tell your friends and join me. The St. Vincent's Omnibus Committee is part of Community Board 2 which oversees the St. Vincent's site. The Community Board could be incredibly influential if it chose to take a stance on this issue as it has great power in the land use process which is central to the fate of the hospital.

Please pass this around, tell your friends, and let's make sure to show up and let people know we are not going away and we deserve a hospital on the Lower West Side of Manhattan.

Also, save the date, the full Community Board 2 meeting is set for Thursday July 22nd and it is even more important to attend this meeting.

I will keep you all posted.

Best,
Yetta

I have been watching the absolutely STUPID hospital closings that Bloomberg has been okay with. Bottom line is, our stupid healthcare system forces too many people (those without insurance) to depend on emergency rooms for their basic healthcare. Emergency rooms are, I learned a decade ago when I first worked in a medical center, is the one place where hospitals lose massive amounts of money. So forcing people, by not providing them with insurance, to use emergency rooms then forces hospitals into bankruptcy. That then means all those people who have to go to the emergency room (either for a real emergency or because they can't afford insurance) then go to other hospitals...which means THOSE hospitals then lose MORE money. So Bloomberg's method of closing hospitals combined with our healthcare system (which hopefully is improving!) leads to MORE New Yorkers dying and MORE New York hospitals failing...leading to YET MORE New Yorkers dying and YET MORE hospitals failing.

Albany and Bloomberg are failing us here. Obama at least is trying to improve the healthcare system and the main change Obama's reforms have made SHOULD be starting to provide people who don't now have insurance with a viable option. So Obama has done something to improve the situation. Bloomberg and Albany have not. They have only made things worse, thus endangering YOUR life by reducing the hospital coverage in NYC.

I invite you to stand with Yetta Kurland against the closing of St. Vincent's hospital.