Editorial Roundup: New York

Albany Times Union. October 15, 2023.

Editorial: Maternal care deserts grow

Services for mothers have been declining across the state for more than a decade. New York needs to do more to reverse the trend.

Maternity wards have been disappearing all around New York since at least 2008, an alarming trend that ought to be getting far more attention than it has up to now.

While a declining birth rate and the economics of running hospitals may explain it neatly enough, the situation’s not that simple – and state legislators and policymakers should not simply accept the declining availability of local maternity services as inevitable. Yet for the most part, these closings have been happening quietly and under the public’s radar.

Residents of the Capital Region are already all too familiar with the trend. Albany Medical Center closed the maternity ward at Columbia Memorial Hospital in 2020, announcing that births would be transferred to Albany Medical Center Hospital – a drive of 45 minutes or more from Hudson. This year, St. Peter’s Health Partners announced the planned closure of Burdett Birth Center at Samaritan Hospital in Troy, the only facility of its kind in Rensselaer County.

But as the Times Union’s Rachel Silberstein reports, there have been 27 more closings or announcements of shutdowns across the state in the past 15 years, spanning from Long Island and western New York to the North Country and a host of points in between.

The closures have been creating maternal health care deserts in rural areas, and they come amid other troubling signs for women and babies.

Even as birth rates in New York and the United States overall have declined, pre-term births have been creeping up in New York, from 8.85 per thousand in 2014 to 9.69 in 2021, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Maternal death rates in the U.S. have been rising even more sharply, from about 20 deaths per 100,000 live births in 2020 to almost 33 in 2021. The rate is even higher among Black women: almost 70 deaths for every 100,000 live births in 2021.

Hospitals say it’s a matter of numbers: With birth rates declining, it’s increasingly difficult to recruit and pay for obstetricians to staff maternity wards or birthing units in less-populated areas, or maintain them even in small cities like Troy.

It’s helpful, to a point, that a new law that took effect this year requires hospitals to look at how reducing or eliminating a service will affect already-underserved communities as part of the process of justifying such an action to the state Department of Health. That process is playing out right now in the case of Burdett, where closure would send expectant mothers across the Hudson River to Albany or Schenectady, or north to Saratoga Springs.

But that leads inevitably to the question: To what end? If a hospital says it just can’t afford to keep a maternity ward or birthing unit open, what’s the solution?

Providing an avenue for complaining about a closure may offer some catharsis, but if that’s all the process offers – and we’ve yet to see that if offers more – it’s weak medicine. New York needs to do more: The state must find a way both to stop the spread of maternal health care deserts and to bring back services to areas that have lost them. And that may well require the state to see medical care from a perspective that’s too often lost in this country – treating health care access as a basic need, even a human right, rather than a business that needs to maintain profitability.

This state has, quite appropriately, spent considerable time and energy protecting the choice to seek an abortion, both as a right and as an integral part of women’s health care. Our leaders must be at least as concerned with ensuring that women who choose to give birth have safe, readily accessible places to do so. On this point, there ought to be no political or ideological divide.

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New York Post. October 16, 2023.

Editorial: New York’s road to rational legal weed sales grows ever more dazed and confused

In yet a new dysfunctional turn in New York’s rollout of legal cannabis sales, city community boards now face a mad rush of applicants for OKs to open licensed shops.

No, boards aren’t to issue licenses — but getting permission to operate at a site is a key step in applying to the state Office of Cannabis Management (Mismanagement is more accurate) for one.

OCM delayed the process for most of a year by limiting applications to the “justice involved,” one of several categories the Legislature privileged in the law that launched this mess.

But after a successful lawsuit from veterans and other categories who were supposed to be favored, OCM threw up its hands and opened the door wide.

So now the 1,500 or so shops that had opened illegally are going all-out to get “kosherized.”

Some are filing multiple applications, obviously hoping to luck out on one of them.

The law orders boards to decide within 30 days, but expect most of them to delay: They’re just not set up to handle the dozens of applications now rushing in.

And OCM, weeks after it set off the gold rush, is only now educating boards on their roles and responsibilities.

One community board official told The Post it’s “a free-for-all wrapped up in a clusterf – – k.”

Blame then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo and the Legislature for passing a law designed to do everything but make this process orderly, a goof that’s already given us the plague of illegal shops.

But Gov. Kathy Hochul is still playing the same game, by her own account “working to build the most equitable adult-use cannabis industry in the nation that invests in communities and rights the wrongs of the past” — rather than seeking sane regulations that protect communities and kids.

We can’t say how many of those charged with getting all this sorted out are themselves regularly using cannabis products, but they sure are acting dazed and confused.

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