ITHACA, NY (WENY) -- Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer visited Cayuga Health on Monday, March 4th, to talk about the recent healthcare cyber attack that has been felt locally and nationwide. Hackers managed to crack into UnitedHealth's 'Change Healthcare', which provides revenue and payment cycle management.

"We have a cyber attack severely impacting our local hospitals, our local healthcare, and hospitals here in the Southern Tier like Cayuga Health and Arnot Health. It also [impacts] our pharmacies, maybe even more severely because they have less of a cash flow," said Schumer.

Sen. Schumer said when a patient goes places like Cayuga Health, Change Healthcare deals with the insurance company and gets the reimbursement and it comes back fairly quickly. Each patient generates a bill when they go to the hospital and the bill then goes to insurance.

"Every day, we provide thousands and thousands [of people] with care. Each one of those points of care generates a bill that goes to an insurance company. Change Healthcare handles that for us and that process was crippled. So, we are accumulating by the day over a million dollars [worth] of claims [and] that revenue is needed for us to continue to pay staff and conduct general healthcare operations. A different payment model is needed in the interim while we change systems," said President and CEO of Cayuga Health System, Martin Stallone.

Jonathan Lawrence, who is the President and CEO of Arnot Health was also at Monday's press conference. He said Arnot Health is fortunate to not be as impacted by the outage as other healthcare systems have, but there needs to be a more permanent solution put in place, as soon as possible.

"We need more permanent solutions. We need additional funding at the national level of a substantive nature to make sure the infrastructure for our organization is preserved and that we don't have to deal with this on an episodic basis," said Lawrence.

Sen. Schumer said if they can unlock those payments, we can get cash flowing back into our hospitals...and allow hospital workers to do their job.

"I'm calling on the Health and Human Services Agency and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid to use their authority to accelerate advanced payments. It's not going to cost the federal government any money, it's just an advance. So if a certain procedure costs a couple thousand bucks, and the insurance company can't pay it because their system is tied in a knot, CMS would pay it. But once they figured it out, the insurance company would pay it and the money would go back to the federal government," said Sen. Schumer.

He added, "The large hospitals in New York City have enough financial cushion so they might survive. But, most of our hospitals which are medium and small-sized, [can't] do it. We have to fix this system and we have to fix it quickly."

To help the hospitals and healthcare systems impacted by the outage, Sen. Schumer proposed a "two-pronged approach." That includes having the FBI to make the case a top priority and hold the responsible hackers accountable.

"[Hackers] target healthcare systems because they want to get paid...The FBI is already on the case with [the] Cyber Security Infrastructure Security Agency. They have to find the bad actors and hold them accountable. Second, and more immediately, until they put these people out of business, I'm calling on the Health and Human Services Agency and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid to use their authority to accelerate advanced payments," said Schumer.