Come and get it — it’s health care for all.
Mayor de Blasio on Tuesday announced a plan to provide doctor-based medical care for the city’s 600,000 uninsured residents — including 300,000 illegal immigrants.
“Health care is a human right. In this city, we’re going to make that a reality,” de Blasio said at Lincoln Hospital in The Bronx, which has one of the 10 busiest emergency rooms in the country.
“No one gets turned away.”
The two-pronged program will seek to register people eligible for insurance in the city’s MetroPlus program, which already has about 520,000 subscribers.
Those who don’t qualify — which includes all approximately 300,000 undocumented immigrants — would be offered a separate pay-as-you-go approach known as NYC Care.
The mayor said the program would cost about $100 million when fully implemented in 2021.
Participants will be provided with a membership card to the municipal hospital system, assigned to a specific primary- care doctor and provided with a 24/7 hotline.
Everyone will be eligible — including those who have not signed up for ObamaCare.
Those in the NYC Care program will pay for visits or medical services on a “sliding scale” based on income — something that’s happening now anyway.
But officials believe that by unifying services under what they tout as a more customer-friendly banner, they can divert patients from emergency rooms, where costs are astronomical.
“Obviously, any time you’re seeing a primary-care doctor or a specialist and you’re getting your issue addressed, that’s immensely better and cheaper than going to an emergency room — and a much better experience,” de Blasio said.
“A lot of money is being spent right now in a very inefficient manner because, tragically, our health-care system got built around a lot of people not being insured and the emergency room being the default place to get health care. We want to flip the script.”
NYC Care will launch in The Bronx this summer and expand to all five boroughs by 2021, he said.
Among the services included will be access to specialty and mental-health care. The cost of medication will also be covered.
Empire Center health expert Bill Hammond applauded the initiative but said it appeared to be more of a “messaging” effort than a “game changer.”
“It’s a fine thing to do … but I think [the mayor] oversold,” Hammond told The Post. “It makes it sound like he’s declaring victory on Medicare for All, but that’s not what he’s doing.”
He added that “the $100 million tells you what you need to know about the scale of this,” making it clear that’s not a monumental sum when it comes to health care.
A pilot project run the city to provide medical coverage to 1,300 uninsured illegal immigrants cost about $6 million, or $4,500 a person — about 27 times what the city is allocating per capita for the new program
“That was a very small pilot with a very different approach,” said the mayor when asked about the cost differential.
Assembly member Nicole Malliotakis (R-SI/Brooklyn), who challenged de Blasio for mayor in 2017, blasted him for burdening taxpayers with yet another bill.
“Our citizens have a hard enough time covering their own health-care costs and now Mayor de Blasio also wants them to pay for the health care of 300,000 citizens of other countries,” she said.
“The mayor must stop abusing the middle class and treating us like his personal ATM.”
City officials couldn’t detail their plans for engaging the 600,000 uninsured.
But they suggested they’d make MetroPlus such a smooth-running operation that it would become desirable even to those who are eligible for insurance but don’t want it.
Attracting undocumented immigrants to a government program is also likely to be a challenge, although de Blasio touted the municipal ID program as proof that such initiatives can succeed.
City officials said an ongoing transformation of the municipal hospitals system, NYC Health + Hospitals, was integral to paving the way for the program.
Budget Director Melanie Hartzog said the hospital system’s cash balance prior to the transformation was roughly $120 million.
In fiscal year 2018, the ending cash balance was $736 million, Hartzog said during a conference call with reporters.
But she declined to discuss other aspects of the hospital system’s finances, such as deficit projections, until the mayor’s preliminary budget is released in coming weeks.
Health + Hospitals CEO Mitchell Katz said improved finances allowed him to hire 38 new primary-care doctors to reduce waiting times from an average of three months earlier this year to just two weeks.
Katz was the architect of similar programs in San Francisco and Los Angeles that subsidize medical services for low-income residents.