Schumer: “God’s greatest gift to us is life, and healthy life,”
POUGHKEEPSIE – US Senator Charles Schumer was at the Vassar Brothers Medical Center construction site in Poughkeepsie, where, in addition to the new hospital, a medical school will be constructed.
Schumer said the Marist College-Health Quest Medical School will mean
much for the community.
“God’s greatest gift to us is life, and healthy life,” the senator said. “This helps bring it to the people of the Hudson Valley. Second, jobs. We are always looking for good paying jobs. This not only employs people in construction and working here, but when people decide to move to a community or a company decides to move, one of the things they look at is how good is how good is the healthcare because the heads of the company don’t want to go to a place where there is rotten healthcare.”
The college plans to employ 100 full-time employees and create several construction jobs as the facility is being built. The institution will accept 60 medical students in its first year of operation increasing to 120 students by its sixth year.
Schumer is co-sponsoring “The Resident Physician Shortage Reduction Act” which boosts the number of residency slots that teaching hospitals can offer to new physicians. Currently Medicare provides funding for hospitals to host a specific number of residents at a given time through the Graduate Medical Education funding program. The bill would allow Medicare to fund an additional 3,000 slots each year for five years.
Citing a recent study of hospitals by the Healthcare Association of New York, 81 percent of the hospitals said that primary doctors are difficult to recruit and 86 percent of those surveyed said there are times when they have to transfer patients from the emergency department because the needed patient care is unavailable. Schumer claims that the bill addresses those issues and others.
