The city’s Public Advocate had a 2:00 PM slot at New York City Hall on June 5, 2026, to speak at the City Council Committee on Hospitals hearing on the Fiscal Year 2027 executive budget. A public schedule from the Office of the Public Advocate listed the appearance. The schedule did not list one word of what Jumaane Williams actually said, and his office has not posted the testimony. The hearing was about the city’s public hospital system and the federal money it stands to lose. What he told them is not on the record.
NYC Health + Hospitals is the largest municipal health system in the United States. Per its public record, it runs 11 hospitals, five long-term care centers and roughly 30 community clinics, employs about 45,000 people, and treats more than one million patients a year, including more than 475,000 uninsured New Yorkers it cannot bill and will not turn away. This is the place you end up when you have nowhere else to go. As of mid-2026, it is doing its budget math with a federal cut bearing down on it.
In December 2025, State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli put out an assessment of the system’s fiscal outlook. According to the Comptroller’s office, H+H has already baked federal Disproportionate Share Hospital cuts of up to $622 million into its financial plans. The city’s Department of Social Services estimated that roughly 950,000 city residents stand to lose health coverage, about 800,000 from Medicaid and 150,000 from the Essential Plan. That matters to H+H specifically because, per the same report, Medicare and Medicaid patients made up 84 percent of its hospital discharges in fiscal 2025. When those patients lose their insurance, they do not stop getting sick. They just stop being billable, and they show up at the safety-net hospital anyway.
The $622 million traces to federal Disproportionate Share Hospital cuts that were scheduled back in 2014 and repeatedly delayed until October 2025, separate from the 2025 federal budget reconciliation law. That reconciliation law brings its own hit. Per an analysis from KFF, the law imposes Medicaid work requirements that take effect January 1, 2027, the start of the fiscal year this June 5 hearing was about. Able-bodied adults in the Medicaid expansion group will have to log at least 80 hours a month of work or community service to keep coverage. KFF reports the work requirements alone are projected to cut federal Medicaid spending by $326 billion over ten years, the single largest piece of the law’s roughly $911 billion in total Medicaid cuts, and the Congressional Budget Office expects about 5.2 million adults to lose Medicaid because of them by 2034.
The man who runs the hospitals has already told the Council what the cuts would do. Dr. Mitchell Katz, president and CEO of NYC Health + Hospitals, testified during the prior budget cycle that if the federal cuts land, service reductions are likely, and he would protect emergency and primary care first, which leaves expensive specialty care, things like cardiology, on the chopping block. Per Gothamist, Katz told the Council the system would have to triage: “We’d have to look at all the services we’re providing and figure out which ones are more essential than others.” On who pays when coverage disappears, he was just as blunt, per the same report: if people have no source of insurance, “there’s nobody to bill.”
Williams has a documented position on exactly this. In his February 17, 2026 statement on the city budget, posted by his own office, Williams argued that savings cannot come at the cost of services, that “finding government savings is important, provided that services are upheld,” and that “there are no simple solutions without raising revenue from the wealthiest of the wealthy.” He has separately pushed, per a budget testimony from his office, for tens of millions in mental-health spending, including expanding overdose prevention centers and the B-HEARD non-police crisis response, which his office notes still answers only about a quarter of the city’s mental-health calls. This was not a hearing where Williams had nothing to say. By his own record, it was squarely his fight.
The Council’s Committee on Hospitals, chaired by Brooklyn’s Mercedes Narcisse, has spent the last two budget cycles flagging holes in the mayor’s hospital numbers. In the prior cycle, per the Council’s own release, members called out the executive budget for leaving out capital money that hospitals said they needed, from a $65 million emergency-room expansion at Metropolitan Hospital to imaging equipment at Bellevue. The June 5 hearing was the next round of that fight, with the federal cuts no longer hypothetical. The Public Advocate showed up. The public has no record of what he told them.
Williams may well have said something useful. The testimony is just not where you can read it, and a budget fight this consequential should not vanish into a video archive nobody links. Bushwick Daily has covered Williams testifying before Council committees before, and it goes the same way: the schedule says he is there, finding the substance is on you.
If you use a city hospital, or you are one of the roughly 950,000 New Yorkers the Comptroller says could lose coverage before this fiscal year is out, this is your stake. The Office of the Public Advocate takes constituent comment and posts its work at advocate.nyc.gov, and the Council’s hospital-budget paper trail, including what gets funded and what gets cut, lives on the Council’s budget site. Ask your Public Advocate’s office what he testified on June 5, and ask your council member which of the hospital cuts they are voting to backfill. The adopted budget is the document that decides which services survive the federal hole, and it is the one to read.
Featured image: Tessa Bury / CC BY 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
