As demonstrators rally in Syracuse, and others walk from Buffalo to Albany, to protest the hospital-closing recommendations of the Berger Commission, the folks at the Opportunity Agenda, working with a number of partner organizations, bring us this Google Maps mash-up showing how the closings would disproportionately affect low-income and minority communities here in NYC. The problem, as Joshua Brustein at the invaluable Gotham Gazette puts it, is New York's fragile finances and lack of access to care. On the one hand, hospitals all over the state are facing bankruptcy - as care is increasingly outsourced to clinics and average hospital stays decline in length, hospitals in the state have lost $2.4 billion since 1998. The solution recommended by the Berger Commission is, among other things, to close some of those hospitals, reducing the "glut" of beds and improving the finances of other hospitals that will pick up business from those that have been shut. However, as the Opportunity Agenda has made clear, this approach will only worsen New York's other health crisis: a scandalous lack of access to health care, which most brutally affects poor and nonwhite communities (full report here [pdf]). The Commission's plan became law when neither Pataki nor the outgoing Legislature rejected it at the end of last year's session. However, it will be subject to legal challenges and further political wrangling, and meanwhile Governor Spitzer will be forced to confront the possibility of having to recommend further closings - not to mention the massive challenge presented by the state's spiraling Medicaid costs. As New Yorkers, like the rest of America, continue to pay the price for the lack of a rational national health care system, we'll have to be aware of how our attempts to deal with the fiscal crisis in health care could end up deepening the human crisis.