After taking the helm at New York’s financially troubled Nassau University Medical Center late last year, Megan C. Ryan stumbled upon something baffling in the books: a two-decade-long series of transactions engineered by New York State that may have shortchanged the hospital by a staggering $1 billion in matching funds.
As a hospital primarily serving patients on Medicare, Medicaid, or who are uninsured, the medical center qualified for federal matching grants tied to state contributions. Ryan’s discovery indicated that the state was having the medical center itself post its share of the match – for around 20 years at $50 million per year – essentially cheating it out of the state’s matching dollars. “We just couldn’t wrap our heads around how a hospital that serves the poor would be forced to put up tens of millions of dollars” in place of state funds, Ryan told RealClearInvestigations.
Ryan says she called James Dering, previously general counsel of the New York Department of Health, for a legal opinion about the financial arrangement. That opinion indicated it was improper.
What seems like a local tussle over health care has all the trappings of a bigger partisan political fight in the run-up to one of the more important races for governor next year in New York.
Hellbound and Down 