[What you need to know to start the day: Get New York Today in your inbox.]
New York City will spend at least $100 million to ensure that undocumented immigrants and others who cannot qualify for insurance can receive medical treatment, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced on Tuesday morning, seeking to insert a city policy into two contentious national debates.
The mayor has styled himself, in his 2017 re-election campaign and during his second term, as a progressive leader on issues like education and health care and as a bulwark against the policies of President Trump, particularly on immigration.
In making the announcement, first on national television, Mr. de Blasio appeared to be trying to heighten that contrast and thrust his efforts on behalf of undocumented New Yorkers into the national debate over immigration, hours before Mr. Trump was to go on television Tuesday night to make his case for a border wall.
“Everyone is guaranteed the right to health care, everyone,” Mr. de Blasio said during a news conference at Lincoln Hospital in the Bronx. “We are saying the word guarantee because we can make it happen.”
The mayor’s office was quick to say that its plan, to be called NYC Care, would not be a substitute for any universal health care at the state level or a national single-payer plan. But, aides said, it was something the city could do immediately and on its own, and not require approval from the State Legislature, which is weighing some form of universal health insurance for New York State.
Indeed, NYC Care would be a mix of insurance and direct spending, and Mr. de Blasio said it would take about two years to get up and running. The city already has a kind of public option for health insurance for low-income New Yorkers, through an insurance plan run by city hospitals and known as MetroPlus.
The NYC Care plan would improve that coverage, which already insures some 516,000 people, and aim to reach more of those who are eligible, such as the young and uninsured, and others who qualify but have not applied.
It would also provide direct city spending, about $100 million per year when fully implemented, on those without insurance, including undocumented immigrants, who already can receive care at the emergency rooms of city-run hospitals.
Details of how those seeking care could do so under the new plan were not immediately clear, thought Mr. de Blasio said that eventually New Yorkers will be able to call a dedicated hotline and be connected to a primary care physician who would be their doctor.
“They will have a card that will empower them to go to that doctor whenever they need,” he said.
Officials had yet to outline how much the hotline would cost, nor what the number would be, and likened the card to a “membership card” to the city’s hospitals.
Such endeavors can be difficult for the city to implement quickly. Mr. de Blasio oversaw the creation of a municipal identification card for undocumented immigrants in his first term. But last week, he said that an ambitious goal of providing MetroCards to about 800,000 residents whose incomes are below the federal poverty line would fall far short of that goal initially, starting this month with cards for only about 30,000 people, or about four percent of the total.
“This is the city paying for direct comprehensive care (not just E.R.s) for people who can’t afford it, or can’t get comprehensive Medicaid — including 300,000 undocumented New Yorkers,” the mayor’s spokesman, Eric Phillips, wrote on Twitter.
The city’s hospital system has been under severe financial strain and running deficits for years. Part of the idea NYC Care, aides to the mayor said, was to ease that burden while providing better health care to New Yorkers.
The current financial plan for city hospitals projects budget shortfalls of over $156 million in 2018, increasing to $1.8 billion in 2022, according to the city’s Independent Budget Office.
Source : Nytimes
