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Let’s Put Christ Hospital Under Public Control

Let’s make healthcare in Jersey City ours. In the face of corporate healthcare mergers, pro-business politicians, and anti-union attacks, we need a plan to bring Christ Hospital under public control. Bold, long-term actions to take municipal ownership over the facility would benefit hospital staff and our community’s wellness.

Having Christ Hospital just down the road should provide some peace of mind. There is no peace of mind, however, in knowing that the CarePoint system, under which Christ Hospital operates, has filed for bankruptcy, that its workers have been threatened with layoffs, and that CarePoint’s new partner, Hudson Regional Hospital (HRH), refuses to recognize healthcare employees’ union contracts. Adding insult to injury, Mayor Fulop has a close relationship with HRH and its executives—at least close enough to have them host a $10,000-$50,000 per ticket fundraiser for Fulop’s Super PAC, Coalition For Progress. As a resident in JC Heights, as a union member, and as a former healthcare worker organizer, I believe that our community deserves more. 

Politicians like Fulop are choosing the capitalists at the top of HRH and CarePoint over the actual healthcare workers who run these hospitals, and over the communities they are meant to serve. Fulop wants to introduce a “dynamic new healthcare model.” What we really deserve is public ownership and operation of what ought to be a public good.

As Jersey City Times reports, a late-October fundraiser hosted by HRH Chairman Yan Moshe and CEO Nizar Kifaieh was busy raising oodles of money for Fulop’s PAC the evening before the HRH board voted approvingly to merge with the beleaguered CarePoint system. “Whether the timing was merely coincidental or not,” Aaron Morrill writes, “the fundraiser marked yet another chapter in Mayor Fulop’s financially fruitful relationship with the businessmen connected with CarePoint and Christ Hospital. Together, they have donated over $1.6 million to Coalition for Progress.” When politicians receive donations like that from industry executives, it’s never without strings attached. And those industry executives naturally have material interests that brush up against what healthcare workers and our community deserve.

Union healthcare workers fought back when Christ Hospital filed for bankruptcy in 2012 to make sure they could keep serving our community. Following its purchase by CarePoint, they fought against the new management’s egregious demands and threats of a lockout. Healthcare Professionals and Allied Employees (HPAE), along with AFSCME 1199J, JNESO, and CIR represent the union workers of CarePoint’s hospitals, like Christ. HRH has refused to recognize the CarePoint union contracts, intimidated Bayonne Medical Center union members, and broken contract conditions with HPAE Local 5147. Union leaders at HPAE successfully got Jersey City Council to pass a resolution in support: an 8-0 vote this Wednesday showed that our council wants HRH management to honor existing contracts and employment conditions. This resolution is good, but our local leaders can do even more. 

Union members and organizers know that when it comes down to it, workers stand on one side and management stands on the other. Healthcare workers want safer staffing ratios, fair pay, and resources to take care of patients. Management wants to cut labor costs and raise executive and administrator salaries. Our city should even more aggressively take the side of healthcare workers and our community, and stand up to HRH management. To start, Team Fulop councilmembers should demand their mayor return any donations made to his PAC by HRH executives or guests to their fundraisers. It would be a powerful statement to show which side our councilmembers are really on, however unlikely it is they’d take that stand. 

More importantly, Jersey City should develop a longer term plan to take over Christ Hospital and run it as a public entity, for the public good. Healthcare should not be set up to profit from illness, and HRH runs a for-profit business model. Some may argue that non-profit models, like what CarePoint became, are better alternatives. Unfortunately, CarePoint’s model has clearly failed, and non-profits are not necessarily any more interested than for-profits in directing their resources toward care. 

Take RWJBarnabas Health, perhaps the largest private employer in all of New Jersey, and the owner of Jersey City Medical Center downtown. RWJBarnabas receives tens of billions in tax breaks, its executives rake in tens of millions in pay, and the system fails to give back to the community, like in 2021 when it spent less than 2% of its enormous revenue on charity care. Just like HRH and CarePoint, RWJBarnabas has major political allies, like Governor Murphy, whose former chief of staff George Helmy joined RWJBarnabas’ executive team before serving as interim US senator. Meanwhile, its CEO Mark Manigan also sits on the powerful Rutgers University Board of Governors—it’s worth noting that both RWJBarnabas and Rutgers faced historic labor strikes last year.

These non-profit models aren’t so altruistic, either. Only healthcare facilities that are under public control have a real shot at serving the public good. Recent studies show that private hospitals underperform compared to public ones in the number of patients cared for, and in access for low-income patients especially.

If we want community power over our health and democratic rights over our care, then we need bolder steps. Let’s map out a timeline for buying shares of the new Hudson Health System—the product of the HRH and CarePoint merger—using tax dollars brought in by these corporate players. Federal and state dollars, perhaps, could support an eventual municipal buyout of Christ Hospital, where Jersey City co-owns a majority share along with New Jersey. Hospital workers will of course still need strong unions, even with public ownership. Nonetheless, these kind of proactive municipal plans for the next five, ten, twenty years, and beyond are paramount. It’s time we invest long-term in a Jersey City that works for working people who want to grow up here, raise a family here, and retire here.

Our public schools are under city governance because they’re meant to serve our city, not education industry executives. Our libraries are, too, because their purpose is for the public good of accessing knowledge. It’s not pie-in-the-sky to imagine public control over Christ Hospital and other healthcare facilities in Jersey City. It’s actually a lot more practical than trusting corporate-bought politicians like Fulop to deliver the care that hospital workers and our community deserve.

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