Coler-Goldwater would lose some $26 million in funding if Governor George Pataki’s budget were to become law, according to a memo Assemblymember Pete Grannis has sent to Speaker Sheldon Silver and others in the Assembly.

It is unlikely the Assembly would pass Pataki’s budget as is.  But there is some danger of bargaining that could reduce the hospitals’ budget allocation.  Grannis, in writing to Assembly leadership, is trying to forestall that possibility.

“I am writing to reiterate my grave concerns with the portions of Governor Pataki’s proposed Executive Budget for fiscal year 2004-05,” Grannis wrote in a March memorandum.  “It appears that the single biggest hit would be on the NYC Health and Hospitals Corporation’s renowned Coler-Goldwater Specialty Hospital and Nursing Facility on Roosevelt Island.”

Grannis points out that Coler-Goldwater is the largest long-term care facility in the State, serving nearly 2,000 patients.  “A cut [of $26 million] would cripple its ability to carry out its mission of caring for the City’s most medically needy individuals.”

“To label this unacceptable,” Grannis writes, “would be a major understatement of my position...  At the very least, Coler-Goldwater should be carved out of this proposal.”

Grannis adds that the combined impact of Pataki’s budget proposals, which include cuts in one-stop enrollment (called “facilitated enrollers”) in the State’s Family Health Plus program, would, according to the Healthcare Association of New York State, result in cuts as high as $30 million in Grannis’s 65th Assembly District.

Other facilities affected by the Pataki proposals (among them a “sick tax” on nursing homes and other facilities) would include Memorial Sloan Kettering ($5.4 million), New York-Presbyterian ($11.3 million), and Lenox Hill Hospital ($2.7 million).

Writing of a Pataki plan to eliminate coverage for dental and vision services under Family Health Care Plus, Grannis says, “This is truly a dumb and ill-thought-out proposal, and [it] should be rejected out of hand.”