For the last month, we’ve been very busy over the last few weeks trying to prevent Mount Sinai Health System from closing down Beth Israel Hospital. We’re building an ever-growing coalition of Lower Manhattan residents, community activists and leaders, local public officials, and hospital workers. We’re all joining forces to try to preserve the last remaining community hospital for much of this part of our city so that the area doesn’t become another hospital desert.

We’re hitting the streets this coming Thursday morning, December 14 for a Community Rally that is being hosted by NYC Councilmember Carlina Rivera and many of her local colleagues from the City Council, State Legislature, and Congress. We’re all gathering at 11 a.m. on the corner of 1^st Ave. and East 17^th St. outside Beth Israel Hospital.

Please join us then to send a loud-and-clear message to Mount Sinai officials and State and City leaders to “Save Our Community Hospital!” Beth Israel has a long history as the safety net hospital for one of our city’s most diverse areas that has welcomed waves of immigrants over many decades, and has served a significant working class and low-income population.

If you can’t make this rally (or even if you can), you can support it by using this social media toolkit before, during, and after it.

Here are publicity materials about this rally to share around:

• Online event page
• PDF flyer — English, Spanish
• Facebook event

If you can’t make this rally (or even if you can), you can support and amplify it by using this social media toolkit before, during, and after it.

Individuals and groups and businesses can also join in this campaign by filling out these sign-up forms.

Why we are in this fight:

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, it has become abundantly clear that our hospital care system in New York is WAY out of balance. Hospital beds are being increasingly concentrated in more affluent, more racially homogenous, medically well served neighborhoods where well-insured people live, while hospitals are closing and hospital deserts are being created in areas where lower-income, racially diverse, medically-underserved, and uninsured people live and work. This dynamic is morally wrong, and doesn’t benefit everyday New Yorkers, nor our shared public health.

This current crisis at Beth Israel is just the latest example of “what’s wrong with this picture.” The good news is that similar community-led fights about local community hospitals are happening across our state in Central Brooklyn, Mount Vernon, Schenectady, and Troy. People are coming together and fighting back. We are proud to be helping to lead the statewide Community Voices for Health System Accountability project that brings health advocates together with local community activists to collaborate and support each other.

It’s time for our state and city leaders to act to restore regional health planning that was eliminated nearly three decades ago, and to adequately support community hospitals with the resources they need to meet their mission, rather than continue to rely on the “magic of the market” to sort it all out. It’s clear that approach doesn’t work, and it merely benefits the already well-off at the expense of those who have much less and are struggling to get by day-to-day, week-to-week.

Government regulators also must strengthen their ongoing oversight of the hospital industry and enforce existing laws and regulations to assure that the rules aren’t bent and evaded, so that all New Yorkers have access to hospital care in our communities. Large hospital networks must be held accountable for ALL the communities they are supposed to serve, and not just protect and grow their central hub facilities.

There’s an old saying that “all health care is local”, and we as a city and state must refocus on that goal. By fighting to preserve Beth Israel Hospital, we are advancing the larger goal of health care access for and within all communities across our city and state.