Red and black background with white text saying "Stay Greedy" and a logo of New York Presbyterian in the top right corner.

NewYork-Presbyterian

How can NewYork-Presbyterian (NYP)’s patients “Stay Amazing" when hospital executives stay so greedy? In the spring, NYP announced sweeping staffing and service cuts while acknowledging that it is one of the most financially stable hospitals in the country.

While NewYork-Presbyterian uses impending Medicaid cuts as a pretext to cut essential frontline staff and services, they continue to:

  • Pay executives millions. NYP’s CEO Steve Corwin raked in $14.6 million in total compensation in 2023. Over 30 of NYP’s top-paid executives made more than $1 million a year in salary, benefits, and perks that same year.

  • Cut frontline staff and healthcare services despite being one of the most financially stable health systems in the city and the entire country. In the spring of 2025, before the Trump administration had passed the infamous Medicaid cuts, NYP used an uncertain economic future to cut 2% of its staff and relocate services to other campuses, making care-seeking more inconvenient and expensive for many patients.

  • Pocket billions from investments. In 2024, their net income was $1.4 billion. According to their first quarter 2025 financial report, released after NewYork-Presbyterian announced staffing and service cuts, the health system earned a nearly $97 million surplus and brought in $2.7 billion in revenue. This is a 4% increase from the same time period last year. They are by no means a cash-strapped institution. In 2024, they announced a $2 billion investment in capital projects including an ambulatory center in White Plains, advanced technologies and digital transformation, “one of the most ambitious initiatives in its 250-year history."

  • Spend untold $$ in legal fees to fight nurses. Rather than safely staffing their units, over the past two years, NYP has invested in meritless lawsuits against nurses who have fought for safe staffing. After third-party arbitrators found that NYP hospitals severely understaffed nurses and ordered make-whole relief for nurses who worked short staffed, NYP administration sent their high-priced attorneys to court to delay and deny justice. After hearing their arguments in one case where NYP attempted to delay an arbitration, a federal judge described their tactics as a form of “gamesmanship” to avoid resolving disputes (New York-Presbyterian Brooklyn Methodist v. New York State Nurses Association, 24-cv-05750-NRM (Eastern District of New York, August 22, 2024), Transcript of Civil Cause for Order to Show Cause, at *57).

  • Short-staff nurses. Over the past few years, NYP has understaffed several units, compromising safe patient care and violating agreed-to staffing levels. In the winter of 2023-2024, the New York State Department of Health investigated staffing complaints at NYP and found nearly 800 staffing violations throughout the hospital. At the same time, a Department of Health report points to a hospital with the exact same bed count as NYP-Columbia being the second highest spender on expensive temporary travel nurses in the state as of 2024—spending more than $20 million in the third quarter of 2024 alone.

  • Short-change patients. Based on a recent Justice Department antitrust investigation, hospital prices could be out of control partly because hospitals like NYP work hand-in-hand with insurance companies to keep prices high. These tactics may help keep them one of the richest systems in the city and state.