Health care groups soften ad campaign against N.Y. governor's proposed budget cuts

From The New York Times:

ALBANY, N.Y. — For about a week, he was the second-most recognizable blind man in New York.

A current commercial features a man in a motorized scooter. An earlier ad showed a man who was blind, like the governor.

But Juan Pietri, who appeared in a television commercial asking Gov. David A. Paterson, who is also legally blind, “Why are you doing this to me?” has been taken out of an advertising campaign paid for by health care interest groups.

The move represents a softer approach by 1199 S.E.I.U. United Healthcare Workers East and the Greater New York Hospital Association, who last week mounted a multimillion-dollar media campaign against the governor’s budget proposal.

Mr. Paterson, who has proposed trimming $3.5 billion from the state’s health care budget, has said that the cuts are necessary, given the projected deficit of more than $13 billion for the coming fiscal year.

When the commercials featuring Mr. Pietri first aired, the Paterson administration dismissed them as a cheap political ploy that ignored the state’s perilous financial condition.

The use of Mr. Pietri, a Bronx resident who appeared on screen in a wheelchair wearing thick black sunglasses, drew criticism. Some newspaper columnists and supporters of the governor suggested that the ads were crassly using Mr. Paterson’s disability to make a political point.

Representatives from the union and the hospital association have denied that they used a blind man as a way to embarrass the governor.

Kevin Finnegan, political director for 1199, characterized the new ads on Thursday as more narrowly focused, but he disputed that the message was any different.

“I don’t see it as a change in tone or message,” he said. “I think it’s just a little bit of a refinement from what we’ve been saying from the beginning.”

Also gone from the television campaign is a 15-second spot that called for an income tax increase on New Yorkers who earn more than $250,000 a year, an idea that has been gaining ground among some Democratic legislators and union-backed groups.

By pulling that ad, which said that the state’s wealthiest residents should “pay their fair share,” the hospital association hoped to avoid antagonizing wealthy philanthropists who are vital to financing hospital operations, according to two people with direct knowledge of the association’s conversations about removing the ad.

The hospital association’s spokesman, Brian Conway, called discussion of an income tax increase an “unnecessary distraction” from the budget problems that hospitals are facing. “Our singular focus is now on the impact of proposed health care cuts to hospitals,” he said.

The new commercials are gentler in tone, but they do not spare the governor from strong criticism and powerful imagery.

In one 30-second commercial airing across the state, a man identified on the screen as Jack Bogart sits on a motorized scooter in a hospital hallway, looks into the camera and says he would be unable to leave home without health care. “It’s a necessity to me; it’s like cutting off my right arm,” Mr. Bogart says. “I can’t lose the people that are taking care of me. I can’t believe that Governor Paterson is the man making this type of proposal.”

In a separate 30-second spot, nurses express concern that they could lose their jobs. “I can’t believe Governor Paterson is the one making this proposal,” one nurse says. “Laying off nurses is not the answer,” another says.

The Paterson administration, which has been struggling to dust itself off from the fallout over the governor’s handling of the selection of a new United States senator, has been brainstorming about how to respond to the attacks.

On Thursday, signaling a more forceful approach, a spokeswoman for the governor said that by running the ads in the first place, the health care groups were only complicating the state’s budget problems.

“The spending lobby uses television ads like these to tell a partial, one-sided story that doesn’t help solve a crisis,” said the spokeswoman, Marissa Shorenstein.

“Our citizens deserve to know the full truth and the facts — that only by reining in spending will we be able to respond to this historic fiscal crisis.”

One person with knowledge of the brainstorming said the administration had ruled out running television commercials of its own — the strategy that Gov. Eliot Spitzer used in 2007 when the same groups aired ads attacking his budget plans.

The union and hospital association plan at least a month’s worth of ads, and will most likely release more in the coming weeks.

The radio and television advertisements are costing about $1 million a week.