Last Night’s Community Meeting To Save Long Island College Hospital- Pictures And The Big Picture

One segment of last night's crowd convened to save LICH

Last night’s “Community Forum on the Future of Long Island College Hospital” (LICH), really a rally in support of saving the hospital with the dissemination of some strategy, was very well attended.  (It was held at the Kane Street Synagogue, 236 Kane Street in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn.)

I am going to let the images here speak for themselves about that.

What I heard at the meeting was this:

    •    The community needs its hospital.
    •    The doctors and financial staff affiliated with the hospital are pretty well convinced they won’t have problems operating the hospital in the financial black if SUNY Downstate would just leave them alone to do it, thank you very much.
    •    That the integration of LICH into the SUNY Downstate system, which was ostensibly for the purpose of ensuring the future of LICH, has had the opposite effect.
    •    That instead of a good faith effort to run LICH as a successful hospital, a plan of asset stripping was being implemented almost immediately.  That meant, among other things, that no money was invested in the hospital with any significant expenditures being made (theoretically for the hospital) directed exclusively to portable assets that could easily be removed from the site when the secretly envisioned closure that was being worked toward takes effect.
    •    That to those in power pursuing this course of action, the attraction of shutting the hospital down  is to create a real estate deal, a sell-off, that will strip the real estate as the final asset out of the health care resources available in the surrounding neighborhood.   This doesn’t recognize that, when used for a necessary community hospital, the real estate has greater value to Brooklyn’s Northwest communities than the construction of more high-end condos.  (Elsewhere in Brooklyn, including at the other end of Brooklyn Heights, - with sort of a bookending effect- public property is similarly being sold off to shrink the library system for the purpose of creating real estate deals.)

More analysis and a petition to prevent the closure of the hospital is available here: Wednesday, February 13, 2013, One-Stop Petition Shopping: Report On The Brooklyn Heights Association Annual Meeting, LICH and Libraries.

The crowd standing to chant "Save LICH"

State Assembly Member Joan Millman, whose petition is available to sign to save LICH, addressing the crowd

Panoramic collage of those Millman is addressing  (click to enlarge)

 

Senator Daniel Squadron

At the very back from the viewpoint of Lincoln Restler

Briefing press

Filled to the back

Middle

Front

Signs at the ready to be raised