Hundreds of members of 1199SEIU and the New York State Nurses Association from Long Island College Hospital (LICH) and Interfaith Medical Center in Brooklyn rallied last night at Governor Andrew Cuomo’s Manhattan offices. They demanded that the Governor break his silence and intervene until solutions can be found to keep both hospitals permanently open.

The picket grew in size and volume as workers joined after their shifts, chanting, “We Need Our Hospitals” and “Hands off our Hospitals.” They carried signs depicting Cuomo and the Grinch. The event was made more poignant by the hustle and bustle of holiday shoppers, a sharp contrast to the imminent loss of critical healthcare in distressed communities and good paying jobs for working people.

“If all of these people lose their jobs, how are we expected to pay our mortgages and our bills?” asked Barbara Jules-James, a medical coder at Interfaith. “How can we all go on unemployment at the same time? How is that good for our community? And most of all how is the loss of our hospital good for our community? How can our community survive like this? “

Also at the rally were workers form numerous Brooklyn hospitals and representatives from patient and community groups, including the Cobble Hill Association and Patients for LICH. Kingsbrook Medical Center PCTs Fay Thompson and Denise St. Bernard rallied for all of Brooklyn healthcare.

“We can’t just wait to see what’s going to happen,” said Thompson. “We have to think of our patients and our staff at all of our institutions.”

“We’ve had four layoffs in the last year at Kingsbrook while the rich just keep getting richer,” added St. Bernard. “This is going on all across Brooklyn.”

Interfaith finance clerk Sheila Arthur-Smith passionately called on Governor Cuomo to do the right thing by Interfaith and her community. “This is a healthcare genocide,” she said. “If you close hospitals what will happen to our patients? How many will have to die before you see that we are in a healthcare tragedy?”