Councilman and chairman of the D.C. Council’s health committee Vincent Gray, D-Ward 7, said on March 24 that a new D.C. hospital slated to serve the east end of the city in 2023 should be opened sooner, following the release of the Mayor Muriel Bowser administration’s 2020 budget proposal.
“We simply can’t continue business as usual until 2023,” said Gray at a D.C. Council budget oversight hearing last week.
“Advancing the hospital funding to fiscal year 2021 makes obvious sense from a health equity perspective and, given the significant subsidy to UMC, it also makes fiscal sense,” he added.
The budget would allocate a total $325.5 million in city funds to build the new hospital planned for the St. Elizabeths campus. However, a majority of the funds will not be spent until its last couple of years. For fiscal year 2020, $46 million has been kept aside under the new proposal, and $72 million for 2021, $87 million for 2022, and $11.8 million for the year 2023. A total of $8.7 million has already been allocated for the hospital.
Gray added that the projected timeline will not meet the objectives since the present Southeast D.C. hospital United Medical Center (UMC) is also struggling financially. The hospital also requires healthy bailouts from the city to keep it functional, according to Gray.
D.C. is known to be suffering due to health care disparities in the east of the Anacostia River. Almost all of the city’s hospitals are in the city’s western side, while the only hospital located east of the river, the D.C.-owned UMC, is in bad state which further exacerbates the crisis.