The State University of New York is starting to shut down Long Island College Hospital.
For more than a year SUNY has been exploring options for selling or shutting the money losing Brooklyn hospital.
SUNY Downstate Medical Center has been losing tens of millions of dollars at LICH per year for years.
SUNY is currently in discussions with the Peebles Corporation for it to possibly purchase LICH and adapt it into a different sort of medical facility.
On Friday SUNY announced that it had stopped accepting ambulances at its emergency department on May 15. It also announced that all other hospital services would stop on May 22.
The closure is mandated by a court order and is in accordance with New York State Department of Health regulations, said Ronald Najman, SUNY director of communications and special projects.
"Over the past several weeks, including working throughout the weekend, SUNY has engaged in serious and increasingly productive negotiations with the Peebles Corporation to reach an agreement in the matter of the Long Island College Hospital," said SUNY communications director David Doyle.
"The extensive efforts to ensure that the people of Cobble Hill have access to quality health care are matched only by SUNY's fiduciary duty to our half million students, thousands of who are from neighborhoods across New York City," Doyle said. "The simple fact is we cannot continue to expect our students to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to cover LICH's financial losses."
LICH has total liabilities of $500 million, Doyle said.
