BY KAREN E. BOWES
Staff Writer
HOLMDEL – The sick can sleep tight. Gov. Jon Corzine’s proposal to tax hospital beds was thrown out at the last minute and will not be enacted.
The controversial idea, to tax all state hospitals $50 per day per bed, was part of Corzine’s original budget proposal, aimed at closing the deficit.
If enacted, the tax would have raised $430 million annually.
For Bayshore Community Hospital in Holmdel, that translates to about $2.7 million in new taxes, according to Chris Domalewski, vice president of community relations and marketing at Bayshore.
She added the hospital would be forced to eliminate as many as 100 jobs in order to pay the tax, cutting patient services as well.
In May, Assemblywoman Amy Handlin (R-Monmouth/Middlesex) began a petition drive to remove the tax from the budget, eventually garnering 1,500 signatures.
“In the end, the governor took it off the table himself, so it never went before the Legislature,” Handlin said Friday. “I think it had become clear to him that there simply were not enough votes to pass it.”
Handlin is a former patient of the hospital’s Breast Care Center, where she received a biopsy several years ago. In 2005, she volunteered to appear in newspaper ads for the breast care facility, which she lauded as helping her through the ordeal with “tremendous support and empathy.”
In June, in an effort to get her message out, Handlin erected a makeshift hospital room outside Bayshore Fitness Center, Hazlet, collecting signatures from curious passersby.
Handlin said the petition’s success was based on “how quickly and decisively citizens reacted when they realized that this tax was a serious threat to local health care.”
“The lesson to be learned is that citizen action can really make a difference,” Handlin said. “In the absence of this outcry, the outcome would have been unpredictable.”
Handlin was not the only local politician who expressed outrage over the proposed tax. The Monmouth County Board of Chosen Freeholders and Assemblyman Michael Panter (D-Monmouth) also publicly stated their objections to the tax.