Mayor Bill de Blasio testified on Monday that shifting billions of dollars in Medicaid costs from state to local government would have dire effects.
“Lives are on the line,” the mayor said at a state budget hearing in Albany. “We ask the state to remove the cuts to localities and safeguard public health by focusing on finding efficiencies and reforms in the state-run Medicaid program.”
Though the city’s contribution to Medicaid is about $5 billion a year, it could be on the hook for $1.1 billion more should the state’s latest Medicaid Redesign Team fail to find $2.5 billion in savings.
“If we sustain this level of cuts, we will have to reduce health services for New Yorkers, profoundly—closing clinics, laying off doctors and nurses,” de Blasio said.
Just a few years ago, New York City Health + Hospitals—which more than 1 million New Yorkers depend on for care—was “teetering on the brink of bankruptcy,” he said. The cuts would undermine the fiscal progress the public health system has made.
Specialty care in the areas of cancer, heart disease and mental health would be affected, and the impacts would extend beyond health care to afterschool and youth employment programs, de Blasio said. Elsewhere in the state, Medicaid cuts could completely bankrupt localities.
To avoid the cuts, de Blasio proposed three recommendations. First, he said the state should work with local governments to achieve savings, such as through weeding out fraud and waste in the program and increasing administrative efficiencies that could better determine when individuals are no longer eligible for Medicaid.
In the city that could equate to $260 million in savings, de Blasio said.
Additionally, de Blasio called on the state to revise the Medicaid global gap to reflect the health care that New Yorkers need and its real costs, and to ask its wealthiest residents to pay their fair share of taxes to make sure everyone has access to health care.
Amid a $6 billion deficit, the state has continued to point the finger at local governments when it comes to increased Medicaid spending.