Excerpts from a 
Letter to Village View from Concerned 
Employees of Beth Israel Hospital

Mount Sinai is again trying to close Beth Israel (now called Mount Sinai Beth Israel or MSBI), a longstanding community institution and vital resource…The bottom line is that Mount Sinai cares much more about cashing in on the value of the land on which Beth Israel sits rather than on providing medical services to the countless people who continue to rely on it, and has long been intentionally doing everything possible to effectuate such. As MSBI employees — including physicians, nurses, and other staff… we hope you can shine a light on Mount Sinai’s disgraceful practices…and the deep void in medical care that such a closure would create in our area. Mount Sinai executives are hellbent on steamrolling the oversight process and gaslighting all concerned and they must be stopped.

Beth Israel was founded in the late 19th century by and for immigrant Jews…and now serves a critical role in the care of ethnically, racially, religiously and socially diverse patients. In her Oct. 25, 2023 letter to Kathleen Gaine of the NY State Department of Health, Elizabeth Sellman, President and COO of MSBI, claimed, “For over a decade, the Mount Sinai Health System has done everything in its power to support, enhance, and transform MSBI into a modern and thriving hospital.” This is an unadulterated lie. In fact, Mount Sinai has done everything in its power to erode the financial viability of Beth Israel, as a pretext for trying to monetize the underlying land, the community’s needs be damned.

…Soon after Mount Sinai took over the Continuum hospitals in 2013, it became obvious that their administrators saw Beth Israel as a real estate play. They systematically dismantled Beth Israel, cherry-picking the most profitable divisions and moving them to the main Mount Sinai site. The claimed $1 billion total losses, including a projected $150 million for the coming year, do not reflect the many lucrative divisions …that Mount Sinai moved to their uptown campus and balance sheet.

Similarly specious is Ms. Sellman’s assertion that, “The 2023 year-to-date overall census is 28%… Since 2012, the average inpatient daily census has declined by more than 65%.” She neglects to mention that this is relative to the entire hospital capacity, most of which Mount Sinai has closed despite the need for more beds, especially during the COVID peak. Indeed, even now, the Emergency Department (ED) often has many admitted patients occupying beds that could be used to see new patients, because the patient units are actually above 100% capacity of the now far fewer beds.

…Ms. Sellman also asserted that closing Beth Israel will not impact the continued functioning of Mount Sinai’s other sites, including the New York Eye and Ear Infirmary, even though Mount Sinai has been reported to be trying to close that venerable local institution and critical medical resource and cash in on its land.

Ms. Sellman further wrote, “Overall, since 2012, MSBl’s Emergency Department visits and acute care discharges have decreased significantly. ED visits have decreased by 42.4% from 122,000 visits in 2012 to 70,252 visits in 2022.”…We are skeptical of Ms. Sellman’s numbers and how they were determined. Any decrease in Beth Israel’s ED volume that may have occurred is undoubtedly related to Mount Sinai’s withdrawal of resources, as well as local residents’ reluctance to face transfer to other facilities….Also, Ms. Sellman didn’t mention ED usage for 2020 or 2021, when visits skyrocketed…Yet even Ms. Sellman’s 70,000 figure from last year is still a huge number of people who would have to go much farther away, to already-overwhelmed alternatives…

While it is debatable whether this area needs a 700-bed hospital, it is beyond dispute that we need a sufficiently large facility to be able to deal with current demand, let alone unpredictable events such as COVID. More than a year after the start of the epidemic, even Mount Sinai acknowledged that their 2016 plan to build a 70-bed hospital on the site of the New York Eye and Ear Infirmary was grossly inadequate.

In 2021, Dr. Jeremy Boal, a senior Mount Sinai administrator, stated,”…we have taken a careful look at our original plan for the new hospital. This analysis has led us to a different conclusion with regard to the best approach to caring for the communities that depend on MSBI…Should there ever be another pandemic of the size and scope that we just lived through, or other disasters that require additional capacity, we will be ready.” It appears that the only lesson Mount Sinai executives learned is to escalate their aggressiveness, while leaving the local community, not to mention their employees, in a virtual information vacuum.

Mount Sinai administration is acting like their scheme is a fait accompli before it is subjected to any regulatory or public scrutiny. We understand that Mount Sinai has hired a small army of lawyers and lobbyists to try to circumvent local and state oversight. They are also clearly hoping that physicians, nurses, and other staff will become exasperated…and seek alternate employment…

Ms. Sellman also wrote, “We will remain open with a smaller bed count as we work with regulators to gradually close the 16th St. campus and continue to evaluate various options for a smaller hospital nearby.” ..Other than perhaps being more attractive to real estate developers, there is no reason why Mount Sinai couldn’t…sell only part of the Beth Israel campus, while maintaining the ED and sufficient inpatient capacity to meet local health care needs…

Mount Sinai intentionally bled Beth Israel dry as an excuse to sell…valuable land and reward…their overpaid, bloated cadre of administrators. To be clear, Mount Sinai’s desire to close Beth Israel is entirely driven by corporate avarice, rather than the health care needs of the community. It would be a gross abdication of the DOH’s responsibility for maintaining public health were it to acquiesce to Mount Sinai’s malfeasance and subterfuge. Such would also signal to other hospital-executives-cum-vulture-capitalists that New York has declared open season on its most critical medical resources.

As Beth Israel employees fearful for (what remains of) our jobs, we cannot speak up for attribution. However, we hope that you will be able to do so.

Sincerely,
Concerned Employees of Beth Israel