State investigators looking into charges a young man’s brain operation was delayed because he lacked health insurance have listened to phone messages from hospital staffers to the doomed patient – including three calls after he died.
In the taped messages, reviewed by The Post, staffers from St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital Center repeatedly pressed for Manny Lanza’s Medicaid status.
As The Post previously reported, Lanza, 24, from Shirley, L.I., died Jan. 6 when blood vessels in his brain ruptured. A procedure to reduce the swelling had been delayed for months – apparently because he had no health insurance, his parents maintain.
In one message to Lanza’s mother, Levia Prieto, who was pressing the hospital to reschedule the procedure to treat her son’s severe arteriovenous malformation, or AVM, a hospital staffer said, “Levia . . . We’re calling to see if you received anything from Medicaid.”
Three other calls were made from the hospital to Lanza’s cellphone, the mother said, after she found him dead in his bed, two months after the operation was canceled.
In one message, an unwitting staffer with Dr. Alejandro Berenstein, director of the hospital’s Hyman-Newman Institute for Neurology and Neurosurgery, said: “Mr. Lanza, if you can give us a call back and let us know if you got your Medicaid card and number, so I can put that down for the insurance information.”