Press Release
Governor’s “State of the State” Highlights Plans to Further Tackle Medical Debt
Today, Governor Hochul delivered her “State of the State” address which reaffirmed several health care and consumer protection proposals she outlined a week earlier and pick up on specific Community Service Society of New York (CSS) advocacy initiatives focused on addressing the devastating impacts of medical debt on New Yorkers and making the state’s health care system more equitable. In her remarks the governor called for:
Reforming the state’s outdated Hospital Financial Assistance Law through legislation that would limit the size of monthly payments and interest charged for medical debt and expanding patient protections to mitigate the worst impacts of medical debt;
Eliminating co-pays for insulin and more broadly eliminating cost-sharing requirements for chronic conditions and pregnancy-related visits for coverage plans offered through the New York State of Health Marketplace. This will improve the medication adherence for many New Yorkers who have diabetes, help to close the health equity gap, and lower overall health care costs;
- Increase access to pre-natal care by expanding New York State’s Paid Family Leave program to cover 40 hours of additional paid leave for pre-natal medical appointments, establishing the nation’s first statewide paid pre-natal leave benefit.
- Guaranteeing continuous coverage for children in Medicaid and Child Health Plus (CHIP) plans up to the age of six years to ensure that no child in need misses out on critical health care services due to a lapse in health insurance coverage;
- Developing state-based subsidies to ensure that Marketplace plans are more affordable;
- Improving access to mental health care offered by health insurance plans by enforcing mental health parity requirements and adding staff and doubling fines for noncompliance.
CSS applauds the governor for her continued commitment to protecting New Yorkers from medical debt, including enacting laws prohibiting credit bureaus from reporting on medical debt and banning hospitals and health care providers from placing liens on patients’ homes and garnishing their wages in medical debt cases. And we look forward to working with her administration on another important piece of legislation (A8170/S7778) that would prohibit the state-operated hospitals from suing patients for medical debt.
We are also thrilled to see the governor raising New York’s Temporary Disability Insurance (TDI) benefits. CSS and partners have worked tirelessly to bring attention to how the state's TDI program was failing New Yorkers because of its inadequate wage replacement. Thanks to her action, thousands of New Yorkers, especially women and pregnant persons, can finally focus on their own health and well-being during pregnancy and not their financial stability.
Housing Plans Offer Few Details
The governor also used her “State of State” to acknowledge New York’s dire housing situation and the need for an “effective statewide approach” to producing affordable housing. We agree; the state desperately needs bold action on housing. Unfortunately, there was no blueprint for such action in today’s announcement.
The section of her “State of State 2024” briefing book on housing is short and mostly highlights ideas already presented last year, sometimes in diminished form or with even fewer details. While we are glad to see a new proposal on housing voucher discrimination, we are unsure why the state's existing program continues to be underfunded. We are also disappointed to see no mention of the Housing Access Voucher Program (A4021/S568B), a broadly popular proposal for a state-level housing voucher to rehouse the homeless and prevent tenants from becoming homeless in the first place.
A new proposal to curb insurance discrimination against affordable housing is a welcome development, but it falls short of meeting New Yorkers' housing needs. While the governor proposes building 15,000 homes on public land, the words "public housing" or "social housing" do not appear anywhere in the briefing book, nor do the words "Rent Stabilization," "Good Cause," or "Tenant Opportunity to Purchase."
In the coming legislative session, we look forward to pushing for all of these policies and more. We encourage the governor to join the housing movement in demanding transformative change to protect tenants, re-house the homeless, preserve public housing, and produce a new generation of social housing in New York City and around the state.
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