Appeal Halts Beth Israel Closure That Lower Court Ok’d Days Earlier

An appeals court ruling has once again halted Mount Sinai’s plans to close Beth Israel, this time only days before its expected March 26 closure.

Mt. Sinai briefly got the go-ahead to close Beth Israel Hospital on Feb. 24, after a judge lifted a restraining order that prevented them from doing so. It initially appeared that the closure of the hospital, which has served countless New Yorkers on E. 16th St. since the 1800s, was imminent. The hospital network was reportedly directing ambulances to go elsewhere, closed its intensive care unit, and emptied out its in-patient beds.

However, a swift appeal by a tenacious group of health advocates–known as the Community Coalition to Save Beth Israel–earned another temporary stay on the process, with an appellate judge ordering that the matter must be considered by a wider panel of judges.

New York State’s Department of Health (DOH) finally approved Beth Israel’s closure plan last year. Mt Sinai was prevented from closing the premises then, though, after the Community Coalition earned the restraining order that was eventually overturned on Feb. 24. They’ve argued then and now that the DOH’s approval was faulty, which one lower court judge has now clearly disagreed with after lengthy review.

The hospital network claims that Beth Israel has lost roughly $1 billion dollars since they purchased it in 2013, making its closure necessary. They’ve been trying to close the hospital since the fall of 2023, drawing multiple lawsuits filed by the Community Coalition. In addition to the two stays mentioned above, these have earned Mt. Sinai previous adverse orders and an initial rebuke from the DOH.

In his Feb. 24 ruling, Judge Jeffrey H. Pearlman wrote that New York State’s Department of Health had not acted in a “capricious” or “irrational” manner by finally approving Mt. Sinai’s closure last August, and that they had not necessarily violated “guidelines” that don’t “require” more stringent review standards.

Essentially, Pearlman ruled that the DOH’s independent “absorption analysis”–basically a measure of how the hospital closure would affect the patient inflows into nearby hospitals–was adequate and trustworthy, and had determined that there were “sufficient beds” at other facilities to “absorb” displaced patients.

The Community Coalition had demanded a “health equity” assessment by the DOH instead, which they believe would clearly demonstrate that Mt. Sinai’s closure plan violates public health laws. However, Pearlman ruled that relevant case law deems such a health equity report a “discretionary” form of “best practices,” rather than something that is legally mandated.

In the Community Coalition’s appeal filing, plaintiff’s lawyer Arthur Schwartz argued that quick action must be taken by a judge to ensure that the appeal has any legitimate chance, given the “warp speed” at which Mt. Sinai is closing Beth Israel. “If the stay [on closure] isn’t reinstated, and the hospital is not directed to resume operations, appellate litigation of the this now year old lawsuit will be academic; the hospital will never be put back together again,” he wrote.

More remarkably, Schwartz made the aforementioned claim that this erosion of services has been immediate: “In the 48 hours since the stay was lifted, every one of the 80 or so admitted patients has either been discharged or transferred to other Mount Sinai facilities. The Intensive Care Unit has been closed. The Cardiac Catheterization Unit has been closed. Ambulances have been notified to not bring patients to Beth Israel because no one is being admitted.”

Schwartz also ripped into the DOH’s independent assessment, which had replaced the health equity report the Community Coalition was seeking, writing that the state agency’s data “wholly deficient.” He also outlined overall increases in ER admissions to nearby hospitals last year, which he argues contradicts the DOH’s claim that they’ll be able to effectively “absorb” redirected Beth Israel patients.

The appeal also outlined an argument that Schwartz and the Community Coalition have been making since they first filed suit, which is that Mt. Sinai is closing Beth Israel as a real-estate ploy. Schwartz argued that Beth Israel has only been losing money due to illegally shuttering its services over the years, which would necessarily lead to vastly reduced income; he writes such a dip in “Beth Israel’s finances are patently the result of Mount Sinai’s own long running effort to create the conditions for the facility’s demise.”

Our Town caught up to Schwartz outside Beth Israel on the morning of Feb. 25, shortly before he filed the appeal. “The judge’s decision didn’t touch on 90 percent of the issues we’ve raised,” he said. “He didn’t get into what a horrible job the DOH has done on assessing the closure, and how it would impact the community and the people that come here.” He noted that many of Beth Israel’s patients were disabled, on Medicaid, or on Medicare.

He added that he had visited the emergency room of a nearby NYU hospital with his mother and noticed poor patient absorption, which he reiterated will only get worse with Beth Israel’s closure. “It’s like cattle cars. People are in the bays, and they’re perpendicular to the bays, and there’s people next to them,” Schwartz said. “This is after they’re admitted, forget about sitting in the waiting room.”

Politicians have chimed in as well. City Comptroller Brad Lander, who is running for mayor in the Democratic primary, recently told Straus News that his son was born at Beth Israel. Its closure would be “a crying shame,” he added.

Given their possibly fragile employment status, Beth Israel healthcare workers have been reticent to speak to the press. Yet after much deliberation on how to say something that wouldn’t get him in hot water, a man in scrubs named Troy told Straus that the hospital’s closure represented a “whole lot of change happening in the community. Change is good, it provides more opportunities for people.”

“Don’t know where, don’t know how,” he added.