Issues: Hospitals

Long-delayed change in payment rules could help preserve health care in the Thousand Islands   State Senator Patty Ritchie today announced Senate passage of a bill she cosponsored that helps secure the future of rural hospitals like River Hospital in Alexandria Bay, and Clifton Fine Hospital in Star Lake.

The bill, S.5431-A, will require the state to pay rural “critical access hospitals” for their actual costs of providing services, instead of relying on reimbursement formulas that currently leave the facilities shortchanged.

The Independent Democratic Conference today urged a prohibition on doctors and other healthcare professionals wearing neck ties, jewelry and other items that studies indicate are carriers for potentially deadly hospital-borne infections.

Senator Jack M. Martins attended a special birthday celebration on Wednesday, April 27 at the offices of Long Island Plastic Surgical Group in Garden City. Zeenabdeen Hadi was turning 4-years-old, but he is no ordinary young man. Zeenabdeen’s perseverance and the commitment of his uncle has brought him from Iraq to the Long Island, where he will undergo medical treatment for serious injuries he sustained back home when he was just under a year old.

A few weeks before his first birthday, Zeenabdeen had been seriously injured when a car bomb exploded outside his home in Iraq. An electrical wire was dislodged and made contact with Zeenabdeen’s face causing serious bone loss and leaving his face disfigured.

New York State Senator Kenneth P. LaValle (R-C-I, Port Jefferson) today announced he has fought for and restored funding to the proposed New York State budget that would have decimated local hospital programs and veterans’ care on Long Island by reorganizing and prioritizing what is important to the First Senatorial District and Long Island and all for less than the original budget as proposed by the Governor.

Coming in at approximately $132.5 billion, the Senate budget spends less than the Executive Budget  and stabilizes the State’s finances this year and in future years.