This month’s shuttering of Heights University Hospital left New Jersey’s second-largest city with just one emergency room, sparking community outcry as local leaders weigh their legal options.
As Jersey City grapples with the loss of the hospital, the fallout from its sudden closure may spur new laws in Trenton.
State Sen. Raj Mukherji, one of the Democrats representing Jersey City, told Gothamist he is drafting a new bill to increase fines against hospital operators that close facilities without getting the state’s approval.
He also said he wants a new legal mechanism that would allow state authorities to take over hospital operations through receivership if the operator is found to be breaking the law…
Corzine established that commission at a time when a number of hospitals around the state faced dire financial troubles and sought state bailouts. But none of those hospitals were simply closed without going through the certificate of need process.
Joel Cantor, the founding director of the Center for State Health Policy at Rutgers, was a member of that commission. He said at the time, they never imagined an operator would simply ignore the certificate of need process the way Hudson Regional Health has.
“The idea was to monitor more closely,” Cantor said. “I don’t recall that we had discussions of imposing penalties, but just to have the state poised to be better positioned to predict when hospitals were getting into trouble.”
The new push to more harshly penalize operators for illegal closures drew praise from Jersey City’s administration and HPAE, the state’s largest nurses union.