FitzGerald calls for emergency declaration.
The City Council today urged the Boston Public Health Commission and Gov. Healey to declare a public-health emergency as a tool to keeping Carney Hospital in Dorchester open beyond the end of the month, when its bankrupt owner plans to close it. Read more.
The Supreme Judicial Court ruled today that if it had its way, it would rule in favor of collapsing Steward Health Care System and its property-owning spinoff MPT in a case involving the amount of insurance money they should get for rebuilding Norwood Hospital, destroyed by flooding in 2020. Read more.
State House News Service reports the owner of St. Elizabeth's Medical Center in Brighton and Carney Hospital in Dorchester has filed for Chap. 11 bankruptcy, which is the kind where they get to keep operating as they try to shake off most of their debts and emerge all shiny and new and healthy so they can dump more money into the pockets of the sort of avaricious vulture capitalists that got them into trouble in the first place. Oh, dear, was that going too far?
The State House News Service reports on the possible sale to OptumCare, a subsidiary of UnitedHealth Group, which already runs for-profit physician centers in Massachusetts.
A Southborough law firm that says it used to defend troubled Steward Health Care against lawsuits involving employment discrimination and violations of the state consumer-protection law yesterday sued the company for not paying its bills. Read more.
The American Prospect reports, in hindsight, it should have been easy to figure out how Steward Health Care would begin circling the drain more than a decade ago. Key point:
For ten years, the hospital chain, which originated as an agglomeration of nun-operated Boston-area neighborhood hospitals known as Caritas Christi, was owned by the private equity firm Cerberus, which extracted more than $800 million in excess of its investment out of the hospitals, then left during the pandemic.
The Globe reports the financial crisis at the company that owns St. Elizabeth's - and Carney Hospital in Dorchester - can have direct patient impact, like when a woman is bleeding internally but the hospital no longer had the embolization coils that might have stopped the bleeding because it couldn't pay for them, and she has to be transferred across the city to another hospital, but by then it's too late and she dies.
Steward Health Care System yesterday sued its insurance companies for allegedly dragging their feet and trying to cheap out on payments to build a brand new Norwood Hospital to replace the one the hospital network says was essentially destroyed by an intense amount of rain one day in June, 2020. Read more.
Seems Steward Health Care didn't like what it was hearing about a Globe story coming out this Sunday focusing on one family's struggles with a mentally ill member who received care at several Steward facilities so it sued the Globe and the patient to try to get an advance look at the article and release the patient's medical records.
Steward lost and now it's gotten lots of people interested in just what the story will say.
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