NYC mayoral candidate Scott Stringer rolls out health care plan, calls for ‘chief health officer’
Mayoral contender Scott Stringer vowed Thursday that the “turf wars” that played out between top city health officials at the height of the COVID crisis would become a thing of the past under his health care plan.
Stringer, who is the city comptroller, aims to create a chief health officer who would act as head of both the city’s Health + Hospitals network and the Health Department in a move that he hopes would break down their respective “bureaucratic silos” if he’s elected.
The move is a response, at least in part, to tensions that came to a head last summer between former Health Commissioner Oxiris Barbot, Health + Hospitals officials and Mayor de Blasio himself.
Barbot resigned as the city’s Health Commissioner last August under a cloud of controversy and after clashing with both City Hall and H+H President Mitchell Katz.
“We cannot afford to repeat the same mistakes that left so many New Yorkers underserved and overexposed,” Stringer said in a written statement Thursday. “Making New York healthier is a big, complex challenge that requires a mayor with a progressive vision, the management skills to break through the bureaucracy and the proven record of prioritizing equity so every New Yorker benefits — and I will be that mayor.”
Stringer’s health care plan, dubbed “Healing NYC,” aims to place more clinics in neighborhoods with limited access to health care, expand its ability to respond to crises through creating a Public Health Corps and stabilize H+H’s finances through improving its MetroPlus health plan.
To get doctors to commit to work in underserved neighborhoods, Stringer said he would create a city-funded debt-forgiveness program to help pay off the student loans of health care workers who sign up in one of those communities for three or more years.
In the policy paper he released Thursday, Stringer notes that compared to Manhattan, per capita, the Bronx has about 25% the average number of doctors classified as general practitioners. Staten Island has about half of what Manhattan has per capita.
“We have primary care deserts in our city that can no longer stand if we seek not only to close health disparities and advance health equity, but also tackle core citywide public health challenges of our time,” Stringer’s paper states.
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