Lawmakers and nurses gathered in Ayer on Tuesday morning to protest the closure of Nashoba Valley Medical Center. A similar rally was held in Dorchester on Monday over the planned closure of Carney Hospital.
Steward Health Care has faced immense public pushback after announcing the closures in its bankruptcy filings, stating it plans to shut down the two hospitals “on or around Aug. 31.”
Critics are worried about how the closures will affect residents’ access to health care services, as well as the jobs that will be lost when the hospitals close.
Melissa Fetterhoff, president and CEO of the Nashoba Valley Chamber of Commerce, said Nashoba Medical Center’s closure would be a “huge loss to the community” as the largest employer in Ayer.
“There’s questions and concerns about the burden that it’s going to put on the already impacted healthcare institutions in the region,” she said. “Everybody is doing anything that we can do to make sure that this doesn’t close.”
In a notice provided to the Massachusetts Nurses Association last week, Steward informed union leaders that 490 jobs would be lost at Nashoba, with terminations going into effect on Sept. 24, according to a copy of the notice obtained by GBH News.
Katie Murphy, president of the Massachusetts Nurses Association, told GBH News Monday that the Carney Hospital closure would affect 240 nurses.
Kim Nikopoulos, a manager at Harvard-based Nikopoulos Insurance Agency, says she’s concerned about mobility for elders who would lose a medical facility close to home and likely be forced to seek medical care in Concord.
“It’s a big loss for the community to have a local hospital, primary care, specialty care — all of those are going to be gone,” she said. “Now we’re going to have elders driving on Route 2 and 495 to get to those other medical facilities, and there’s no public transportation in this area other than the train, which wouldn’t get them to Concord, necessarily near the hospital. So you now have a system that really isn’t helping that aging community to be able to get to doctor’s appointments.”
What’s next
At both protests this week, people called on Gov. Maura Healey to enforce a state law requiring medical facilities to provide 120 days notice before closing.
“Unfortunately there is nothing that I can do to stop the closure of the two hospitals in particular that Steward has announced it’s closing,” Healey told reporters at the State House on Monday.
She said her administration is focused preserving the six facilities that did receive qualified bids, which includes Saint Elizabeth’s Medical Center, Saint Anne’s Hospital, Good Samaritan Medical Center, Holy Family Hospital-Haverhill, Holy Family Hospital-Methuen and Morton Hospital.
The state plans to provide $30 million to support the six Steward hospitals that are transitioning to new owners and keep Carney and Nashoba open until the end of August, according to court documents.
The first $11 million payment will be made Thursday, with a second payment of nearly $19 million due in mid-August, according to an emergency motion filed in Steward’s bankruptcy case. Steward said it requires cooperation from its landlords and the trusts that own the land beneath the hospitals in order to move forward with the sales and transfers.
Healey told reporters Monday that the payments are “advances” on Medicaid funds that the state owes Steward.
Other lawmakers are pursuing different avenues.
Boston City Councilors John Fitzgerald and Ed Flynn authored a resolution Monday urging the Boston Public Health Commission to declare a state of emergency and seize the Carney Hospital building through eminent domain until a permanent operator is secured.
“The request from Steward to close these two hospitals so quickly is unconscionable,” the resolution reads, “and the closure of Carney Hospital will have devastating and cascading negative impacts on Boston residents.”
Sen. Ed Markey told reporters Monday he plans to make Steward and CEO Ralph de la Torre “answer for their greed” during testimony in front of a Senate committee on Sept. 12.
Markey also vowed to send a letter to the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of Texas, urging the court to mandate Steward to reduce and restructure hospital leases, direct revenue from hospital sales to the commonwealth and comply with legal requirements for hospital closure.
“Greedy corporations feed on community anchors, such as Carney Hospital,” Markey said. “Steward and the private equity firms saw the community reliance on this hospital as an opportunity to make money, and it means they knew the risk when they piled debt onto this hospital.”
Marilyn Schairer contributed reporting.
