The One Big Beautiful Bill is a Disaster for New York Hospitals. Let’s Make Sure No Bills in Albany Make it Worse.
The One Big Beautiful Bill includes the largest health care cuts in American history, with New York State and its hospitals absorbing a disproportionate impact. When fully implemented, the federal law will cut $8 billion from New York’s hospitals and trigger a loss of an estimated 34,000 hospital jobs statewide.
The hospital community has begun preparing for the law’s severe financial impact. Some institutions have already announced layoffs. Many more are certain to follow. It is an agonizing decision that no hospital ever wants to make.
Hospitals will face other difficult decisions. The Healthcare Education Project—a joint initiative of Greater New York Hospital Association and the health care workers union 1199SEIU United Healthcare Workers East—recently conducted a statewide poll to gauge what New Yorkers know about the OBBB’s health care cuts and, more important, their attitudes about the harsh choices hospitals face in response.
Not surprisingly, the poll respondents are deeply concerned that the law will result in significant hospital layoffs and that some hospitals will close. They are equally concerned that hospitals will scale back crucial health care services such as mental health, and that layoffs and service reductions will lead to longer emergency room wait times.
Further down on their list of concerns, the poll respondents worry that the OBBB will accelerate New York hospitals’ need to “cost shift”—meaning charge higher prices for commercially insured patients to offset steep losses from chronic Medicaid and Medicare underpayments. Hospitals lose money on every Medicaid and Medicare patient they treat and must therefore negotiate higher payments from commercial insurers (if they can) to remain financially viable.
We share the public’s anxiety about these choices. The OBBB has left hospitals between a rock and a hard place.
It could soon get worse. Some are pushing a bill in Albany that would cap how much health care providers can charge for certain outpatient services and forbid hospitals from even billing for those services. Even without the OBBB, this so-called “Fair Pricing Act” would seriously harm all New York hospitals, compel many to curtail vital services, and force some to close their doors for good. Combined with the federal law, the bill would end New York’s health care delivery system as we know it.
The OBBB has made the fiscal landscape enormously challenging for New York’s hospitals and the patients we serve. Let’s work together to find solutions, and certainly not do anything to make the situation worse.
Mr. Raske is president of the Greater New York Hospital Association.
