Save Our Hospitals, Part 3 — Muhlenberg defense moves to Trenton

Plainfield residents, hospital employees and POP members at the State House steps

“We will be back, and on a weekday when the Assembly is in session!” This statement, these sentiments probably best sum-up the success as well as challenges of the rousingly impressive march and rally to save Muhlenberg Hospital on the NJ State House in Trenton this past Saturday, April 5.

Our rally exceeded all expectations from the week before. While the ad hoc coalition that the Plainfield Branch of the People's Organization for Progress had organized of hospital employees, community residents and elected officials (see previous Fire on the Mountain posts POP says “Save Our Hospitals!" and “Save Our Hospitals!” It's personal… for background info) has continued to meet weekly, and while a group of doctors from the hospital volunteered to cover the cost of ten buses to Trenton, the efforts by the for-profit hospital corporation that bought Muhlenberg to create the illusion that the closing was written in stone appeared to be gaining traction. At least in the press.

A portion of the massive rally in Trenton

Because of this, a rising level cynicism about the community's chances of success seemed to engulf the coalition. And while it is essential to follow Amilcar Cabral's advice to "tell no lies; claim no easy victories" (to realize exactly how hard it will be to keep the hospital from being closed), it is also important to not be overcome by the difficulty of a battle before it is lost. As speaker after speaker pointed out in Trenton, Solaris Corporation spends significant effort trying to convince us that their appeal to close Muhlenberg has already been approved by the NJ Commissioner of Health and Senior Services, when the commission had merely agreed to hear the request.

Muhlenberg's physicians paid the cost of ten large crosscountry-style buses to Trenton, enough to transport up to 480 people. The overwhelming success of Saturday's march on the State House is indicated by the nearly six hundred folks who came from Plainfield, both in the provided buses and by their own cars!

DEMANDS OF THE PEOPLE WHO OPPOSE CLOSING MUHLENBERG REGIONAL MEDICAL CENTER

WE DEMAND

1. Muhlenberg Regional Medical Center (MRMC) remain open as a full service "essential" hospital.
2. An immediate halt to the the transfer, termination, or shut down of any MRMC services, procedures, departments, units, equipment and other assets; an immediate halt to the transfer and lay-off of employees; an immediate halt to the diversion of insured and uninsured patients from MRMC to other facilities; and the maintenance of the "status quo" at MRMC at least until the Certificate of Need application process has been completed and a decision is issued by the Commissioner of Health and Senior Services.
3. No further action be taken to close MRMC until a total community needs assessment is completed by an independent entity.
4. Solaris Health Systems, Inc. (Solaris), with regards to MRMC, adhere to the Certificate of Need application process as set forth by state law.
5. The restoration of all of services, procedures, departments, employees, units, equipment, and other assets that have been transferred from MRMC or shut down. They must be restored to insured and uninsured patients alike at MRMC.
6. Solaris provide a full report on the evaluation of alternatives it considered for MRMC to remain a full service hospital.
7. Solaris provide a complete accounting of the endowment funds it is holding in the name of Muhlenberg Hospital and the nursing school, and how these funds will be used in the event of MRMC closure.
8. Solaris provide a backup plan for Emergency Management in the event of a catastrophe if MRMC is closed.
9. Solaris provide a plan for eliminating loss of life and deterioration of healthcare delivery services to the elderly, the uninsured, the physically and mentally impaired and patients who lack transportation to other hospitals in the event of MRMC closure.

The struggle continues…

Plainfield Mayor Sharon Robinson-Briggs addresses Trenton Rally

[And thanks to The Union Girl for spreading the word!]

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“Save Our Hospitals!” It’s Personal, and Not Just for Me…

Earlier this week, I wrote about the ongoing struggle to keep Plainfield’s Muhlenberg Regional Medical Center from being closed. By linking the fight to save Muhlenberg to both the general economic crisis the US faces and, perhaps more importantly, the imperial ambitions in the Middle East of the rulers of this country, I indicated that this is a much larger and more significant battle than just saving one hospital.

And, yes, it is all that, but the fight to save community hospitals also hits much closer to home… This history of these community-based hospitals in New Jersey being padlocked is personal.

Nearly 35 years ago, after an industrial accident in Newark, I was rushed by the Ironbound Ambulance Squad to St. James Hospital. The squad members chose St. James because back in the mid-70s it had reputation. among emergency personnel, as the top hospital in Newark. After being treated, the doctors and nurses of St. James made me promise to see my own physician in the morning. While there were no broken bones, nor apparent major injury, the gravity of the accident had them concerned.

St. James was recently closed.

Ten hours later I was on a gurney in a coma at the highly-acclaimed suburban St. Barnabas Medical Center. Staff there spent the entire night trying to locate the neurosurgeon on call 'til my doctor (a surgeon, himself) gave up and had me transfered to inner-city Orange Memorial in East Orange, where he knew a neurosurgeon on staff. The team at Orange Memorial operated to relieve the inter-cranial pressure, located the blood-clot with one of the first CAT-Scans ever performed in NJ, and gave me excellent care for the month I remained in the coma.

St. Barnabas (in suburban Livingston) is flourishing. Orange Memorial, like St. James, is now closed.

The lesson? Medical Centers that the insurance industry demean as “ghetto hospitals” are actually community hospitals where the doctors and nurses care for the sick and injured. The institutions that get the funding, equipments and kudos, on the other hand, tend to be privately-owned facilities with special relationships to the health-insurance industry.

And, as I've seen in a very personal way, it is these community hospitals that save our lives and our families’ lives, while the nationally noted institutions turn people like us out onto the street.

So keeping the community hospitals open is personal, personal to every working-class and minority individual and family in this country!

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POP says, “Save Our Hospitals!”

I was in Plainfield last weekend when it seemed like the entire city turned out to demonstrate against the for-profit Solaris Healthcare corporation's plans to shut down the more than 130 year-old Muhlenberg Regional Medical Center. The crowd that Steve Hatcher, chairman of the Plainfield Branch of the People's Organization for Progress calculated at 1,000 was both large and diverse. From elderly recovered cardiac patients who owed their very lives to the care they'd received to the young cheerleaders pictured above, from the wealthy of the nearby Crescent Historic District to working class African-American and Latina/o communities that make up approximately 89% of the municipality, every sector of the community was represented.

An older white woman at the demonstration asked me, with genuine curiosity, why the People's Organization for Progress had organized this action. My guess is that her only previous exposure to POP had come through our monthly picketline at the so-called Military Career Center on Plainfield's Front Street (in the Latina/o community) or our reputation for fighting against police assaults on African Americans and other people of color. (Four members of the local branch recently had all charges dropped after being arrested for holding an anti-police brutality banner in front of City Hall.)

But POP has included healthcare among our Core Demands for more than twenty years. So fighting hospital closings is not simply something POP does, it is part of who we are. We have been in the middle of organizing against a wave of hospital closings in Northern New Jersey that has hit Orange Memorial, Irvington General, Montclair Community Hospital, Mountainside, as well as St. James (a POP-supported protest is shown below) and Columbus.

While the Democratic Party's presidential contenders vie and debate over which of them has a more thorough going healthcare platform, while the left decries the fact that neither front-runner Barack Obama nor Hillary Clinton have pledged their support for true universal single-payer healthcare, the day-to-day needs of the great majority of people are somehow getting lost in the shuffle.

But local community-based hospitals are being bought-up and shut-down by large for-profit medical centers or the same huge insurance corporations that view healthcare as a business instead of a right. Since around the beginning of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, New Jersey witnessed local community-based hospitals close at a frightening rate. Organizing to stop this trend is literally a life-or-death issue to working people in this state, and around the country.

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