The New York Times covers the continuing drama at LICH today with some insight on the different points of view on how to handle the facility’s financial woes:
New York Times: A Hospital’s..: Dr. Arnold L. Licht, a psychiatrist who is president of the 800-member medical staff, said the hospital’s relationship with the company, which began in 1998, had been an unhealthy one, leading services there to deteriorate, equipment to age, and prominent doctors to leave.
“I really feel that we’ve been treated almost as a classic British colony,” Dr. Licht said. “We’ve been controlled and exploited.”
But Jeff Strabone, president of the Cobble Hill Association, a neighborhood group, raised questions about the financing of the medical staff’s plan and said his organization favored a different proposal, for the hospital to partner with another nearby operation, like SUNY Downstate Medical Center.
Dr. Licht, in turn, said the doctors had engaged with an investment banking firm and expected the firm to issue a letter of high confidence in the plan’s financing soon.
As for a possible new partnership to sustain the hospital, he said, “It should be a relationship that’s based on mutual benefit, based on negotiations between organizations, rather than us being handed off like so much chattel from one organization to another.”
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