Park Slope Food Co-op Takes Up New Cause: Saving a Hospital

Michael Nagle for The New York Times Park Slope Food Co-op

The Park Slope Food Co-op, which fought a veritable civil war over whether to boycott Israeli products, has taken on a new cause célèbre: the fight to save Long Island College Hospital.

In a letter written “on behalf of the 16,000 members” of the co-op, its general manager, Joseph Holtz, and a member, Dr. Saul Melman, call on Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo to “take a leadership role” in developing a plan to save the money-losing hospital, known as LICH, which serves a large swath of food co-op territory from its perch in Cobble Hill in northern Brooklyn.

Mr. Holtz said Thursday that the fight over whether to keep LICH open was an appropriate issue for the co-op to engage in because it fit the seventh of the seven international principles of cooperation. “The seventh one is concern for community,” he said. “We feel like it’s something the co-op should be involved in when the basic infrastructure of our community is threatened, and part of the basic infrastructure is health services. By taking a hospital out of our community that serves a significant number of people, that’s going to make it really bad for everyone who lives here.”

LICH is run by SUNY Downstate Medical Center, part of the State University of New York, which has said the hospital is losing so much money it is threatening the rest of the medical center. SUNY officials have also noted that many of the affluent residents of northern Brooklyn prefer to seek medical care in the more prestigious Manhattan hospitals, leaving LICH dependent on poorer patients whose government health insurance â€" if they have it â€" pays less than private insurance plans.

Mr. Holtz’s co-signer on the letter, Dr. Melman, an artist and an emergency room doctor at LICH, said that wealthy, educated co-op members were patients at LICH too, and that this was not limousine liberalism. “I personally have taken care of too many to count co-op members in the E.R.,” Dr. Melman said.

At the co-op’s general meeting on Tuesday, when the letter was overwhelmingly approved by about 300 people, Dr. Melman said, one man told how his first child had been born at LICH and a father of three said he had recently taken his 3-year-old, who was vomiting, to the emergency room. “He was surprised about the short waiting time and the excellent care he received,” said Dr. Melman, who sent the letter to Mr. Cuomo by FedEx on Wednesday.

Ruby Washington/The New York Times Long Island College Hospital

With the population of northwest Brooklyn growing, he said, waiting times in other hospitals, like Methodist and Brooklyn Hospital Medical Center, would be even longer if LICH closed, Dr. Melman said.

Downstate recently withdrew a request for permission from the New York State Health Department to close the hospital, under pressure from doctors and unions who filed a lawsuit to block the closing and obtained a temporary restraining order.

Asked for comment on the co-op’s letter, a spokeswoman for the Health Department said, “SUNY is formally reaching out to hospital operators and health care providers to gauge interest in providing medical services in the LICH community, including running LICH as an acute care hospital.”

Mr. Holtz said that saving the hospital was considered urgent enough that it was skipped over other items on the co-op’s packed agenda, which included issues like whether to phase out the free distribution of plastic bags for customers to put their vegetables in on the shop floor, and whether to start another co-op branch.

“If it had had its normal term it would have been later this year or early next year, because there’s quite a few agenda items in the pipeline,” Mr. Holtz said.

But Mr. Holtz compared the LICH decision to the co-op’s decision to oppose hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, on the grounds that it was a threat to the food chain.

“This was really easy, you know, it had overwhelming support,” he said.