RWJ Barnabas Health closing 135-year-old Monmouth Medical Center, relocating to Tinton Falls

In the grand tradition of American progress, where the new must always bulldoze the old, the people of Long Branch are learning a painful lesson: a hospital is not defined by its care, but by its license.

This Thursday, the State Health Planning Board will hold its final public hearing on a proposal by RWJ Barnabas Health to strip the 135-year-old Monmouth Medical Center of its acute-care hospital license and relocate it to Tinton Falls.

The corporation insists the Long Branch facility is “not closing,” a statement with the technical accuracy of a lawyer and the warmth of a subpoena.

What is actually being left behind is a clinical shell—a satellite emergency room and outpatient services, a place where you can get a bandage but not major surgery, a diagnosis but not a baby delivered.

The heart of the hospital—the intensive care unit, the labor and delivery wards, the inpatient beds—will be carved out and transported five miles away to a new $252 million facility on the Vogel Medical Campus.

They call this “reorganizing.” The people of Long Branch call it a robbery in broad daylight.

The justification for this surgical removal, we are told, is accessibility.

The executives in their boardrooms—who likely haven’t waited for a bus in this century—have determined that a location off the Garden State Parkway is simply more convenient for the majority.

This is a fascinating arithmetic that coolly calculates the needs of a carless senior in Long Branch as less than those of a commuter from northern Ocean County.

It brings to mind the man who sells your wheels and then offers you a complimentary map, boasting of his generosity.

For the 81-year-old who doesn’t drive and faces an $18 cab fare to Tinton Falls, or for the low-income family relying on a patchwork of buses, this new “accessibility” is a locked gate.

RWJ Barnabas, which enjoys the tax benefits of a nonprofit, has the gall to promise free shuttle rides as a panacea.

One can only imagine the scene: a woman in labor or a man clutching his chest being told to wait for the next van, which may or may not be stuck in the infamous summer Shore traffic. This is not a healthcare plan; it is a logistical nightmare disguised as a benefit—a cruel joke for which the most vulnerable will pay the price.

Opposition to this “concierge hospital for wealthier patients,” as Congressman Frank Pallone rightly calls it, is fierce and bipartisan. Local officials from Red Bank to Long Branch have passed resolutions against the move, warning it will create a “health care desert” and swamp neighboring hospitals like Riverview Medical Center, which is already one of the busiest in the region.

Even other health systems, such as Hackensack Meridian, warn of the destabilizing effect on the region’s healthcare. Yet the public process has been a spectacle in itself.

The previous hearing was held in a venue so small that residents were left waiting in the cold, prompting accusations of political theater and a process designed to silence—not hear—the community.

This Thursday, December 4, at 10 a.m., the State Health Planning Board offers one last chance for the public to speak, both virtually from the Long Branch Senior Center and in person in Ewing Township.

The community must now decide whether it will accept the corporate reassurances that a hospital can exist without its vital organs, or demand that healthcare remain a right for the people who depend on it—not an asset for the corporations that profit from it.

The license is the life. And once it is transferred, the Long Branch campus, for all practical purposes, is a corpse.