Queens pol’s life expectancy bill passes
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Queens Councilmember Lynn Schulman got a bill passed on Thursday that looks to raise life expectancy and promote better health outcomes for New Yorkers. Emil Cohen/New York City Council
By Ryan Schwach
A bill that aims to increase the life expectancy of New Yorkers first introduced by a Queens councilmember was passed in the city’s legislature last week.
Approved unanimously by the Council at Thursday's stated meeting, Queens Councilmember and Chair of the Health Committee Lynn Schulman’s bill would require the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene to create a 5-year plan to address improving public health outcomes for New Yorkers.
The bill also helps codify into law initiatives tied to the mayor’s Healthy NYC program, which looks to increase life expectancy and address accessibility to health care.
Life expectancy, a globally used, but under-recognized health care metric, Schulman said, took a slight dip for New Yorkers during COVID.
While Schulman said she wants to address the decrease and set a hard goal for the city to reach, she also wants to address the racial disparity in life expectancy seen across the city.
“The goal is to reach the age of 83 in terms of life expectancy, which is on the higher side, and particularly in communities of color, there's a big gap between life expectancy,” said Schulman.
According to city data published in the first Healthy NYC report, the city reached its highest overall life expectancy, of 82.6 years, in 2019, but decreased significantly between 2019 and 2020.
The largest decreases were among Black and Latino New Yorkers.
For Black New Yorkers, life expectancy is 76.1 years, compared with 81.8 years for white New Yorkers. In 2019, life expectancy was just 4.6 years shorter for Black New Yorkers.
While life expectancy is used to study citywide health outcomes, Schulman is hoping the metric gets more attention because of its potential to tie in a number of factors, including chronic disease, environmental conditions, mental health and gun violence, into the understanding of an individual's health.
“It's measured all over the world, but people sort of half pay attention to it,” Schulman said.
The bill looks to identify and attack the causes behind the drop in life expectancy, and raise it back up toward 83 years old.
“It's basically a way to reimagine public health's role in society and government,” she said.
Schulman said that because of the expansiveness of the measurement, the bill likely will take years to take effect. However, backed into it is its own extended lifespan.
“What's exciting about this bill, is that the lifespan of this bill goes beyond this administration, the mayoral administration and also the elected administration,” she added. “We'll all be out of office, but this will still be going on because it's such an important issue.”
Schulman said that life expectancy isn’t “sexy for the political environment,” because it is intangible, and takes a significant amount of time to actually effect.
Health outcome issues in the city will have to be addressed locally, with different neighborhoods and communities experiencing different issues and different rates of illness.
“It identifies cross-cutting influences, mental health, climate change – these are all pieces of access to healthcare,” Schulman said. “These factors cut across multiple direct causes of death.”
Councilmember Lynn Schulman said that accessibility to quality health care is among the issues she hopes her new bill attacks, particularly as Queens has the lowest hospital capacity of among the five boroughs.Eagle photo by Ryan Schwach
Areas of Queens, particularly in Southeast Queens adjacent to Schulman’s district, experience some of the worst healthcare outcomes in the entire city.
City data shows the Rockaway peninsula has some of the city’s highest rates of both death and premature death. Communities in Schulman’s district, like Richmond Hill, are better than the city average, but not among the best in the city.
The Health Committee chair said that she plans to soon begin to make trips across the city with the city’s Department of Health commissioner to go to “different communities and sit down with them and talk to them about the healthcare needs in those communities and what the barriers are.”
What that often comes down to, Schulman said, is access to healthcare.
“In my district, I have only hospitals,” she said. “I have Forest Hills LIJ and I have Jamaica Hospital and neither one of them is in the middle of the district…So, in between, we have urgent care centers, which is not really primary health care. This is something that I've been pushing for, making sure that we have that there is accessibility.”
Accessibility means locals are less likely to be screened for conditions like breast cancer, and are less likely to receive quality care when they do have a medical issue.
“When we talk about increasing housing, you have infrastructure for that, and there's not a healthcare infrastructure from my standpoint,” she said. “That's why Queens has the lowest hospital capacity of the boroughs, and was the epicenter of [COVID-19].”
The bill is expected to be signed by Mayor Eric Adams, who Schulman – despite the Council’s recent issues with the other side of City Hall over public safety legislation – recognized for making healthcare a priority.
“I'm working with the administration,” she said. “They're very excited about this bill. They worked with me to get this bill passed. It's a partnership, and everything else aside…this mayor is the most focused on healthcare of any of the mayors that I've worked with.”
