Weekly Roundup State House News – Primary Care
Chris Lisinski
AUG. 30, 2024…..It’s the eve of two hospitals shutting down, and four others are set to change hands. Do you know where your state legislators are?
If they’re from the areas around Nashoba Valley Medical Center in Ayer and Carney Hospital in Dorchester, odds are they’re adding their voices to the last-minute, likely doomed calls for state government to dig deeper into its bag of tools and keep the facilities open.
Maybe your local rep or senator instead had their plate full over the past week finding a previously unobtainable agreement on major long-term care industry reform legislation. Or perhaps they’re one of the few incumbents — their colleagues might call them unlucky — who actually drew a primary challenge, and are therefore out on the campaign trail trying to convince voters to award another term.
And if none of those apply, well, based on the lack of foot traffic at the State House, your lawmaker might just be on vacation.
The past week was something of an oddity on Beacon Hill, simultaneously a turning point in the public health crisis that has dominated headlines for months, a step forward on reconciling legislative loose ends, and another stretch of slow summer days.
Nearly two weeks after Gov. Maura Healey announced tentative deals for new operators to acquire four of Steward’s hospitals, the bankrupt system that had been mostly silent on the outlook finally confirmed Thursday that it signed “definitive agreements” for the sales.
A federal judge still needs to greenlight the purchase agreements that would see Providence-based Lifespan purchase Morton Hospital in Taunton and Saint Anne’s Hospital in Fall River, and Lawrence General Hospital buy the Holy Family Hospital locations in Methuen and Haverhill.
That approval could come as soon as next week, in the process reshaping the landscape of health care services in Massachusetts. And before then, two holes will get punched into the map.
Nashoba Valley Medical Center in Ayer and Carney Hospital in Dorchester are set to close this weekend after Steward said it did not receive any qualified bids to take over the community hospitals. And while the Healey administration is working to seize the land at St. Elizabeth’s in Brighton by eminent domain to facilitate its transfer to a new operator, the governor and her deputies insist — in the face of repeated criticism — they are unable to do anything more for Nashoba and Carney.
Days before the shutdowns hit, patients, staff and activists from the areas gathered outside a nearly empty State House to deliver their latest desperate plea for action.
Locals are not the only ones sounding the alarm. The ombudsman assigned to supervise patient care during Steward’s bankruptcy warned that once Nashoba closes, a five-minute trip to an emergency department will turn into a half-hour drive and put burdens on other facilities that do not have enough bandwidth.
“This toxic combination of delayed EMS response times and overtaxed EDs will lead to dire results for patients needing emergency care,” the ombudsman, health care management consultant Suzanne Koenig, wrote.
Patient volumes have reportedly dropped significantly at the facilities during Steward’s public upheaval, but previous state data suggested they served hundreds of thousands of people who will now need to find alternatives.
Some of what the ombudsman recommended will indeed happen. The Healey administration on Friday afternoon announced a series of steps to mitigate the impending closures at Nashoba and Carney, such as organizing around-the-clock “stand-by ambulances” at both hospitals for seven days after they shutter and working with the Department of Mental Health to help open more geriatric psychiatry beds at Good Samaritan Medical Center to offset lost beds at Carney and Nashoba.
Officials also hinted at preliminary conversations that would revive the use of Nashoba’s facilities in some other capacity. The Executive Office of Health and Human Services has been talking with UMass Memorial Health and other local providers “with the goal of reimagining future care on the Nashoba Valley Medical Center campus,” Healey’s office wrote in a press release.
“UMass Memorial Health is considering alternative possibilities, such as converting the hospital’s emergency room into an urgent care facility. While these discussions are in the early stages, there will be continued collaboration with UMass to attempt to provide an alternative healthcare option for residents,” Healey’s office wrote.
The rally might not have caught the ear of many lawmakers, but it wasn’t exactly a typical dead August week under the Golden Dome.
Democrats reached agreement on a package of reforms to the long-term care industry, bundling together new infection control protocols, heightened penalties for bad actors, a capital improvement and workforce training fund, and other changes designed to boost a sector devastated by the COVID-19 pandemic.
The omnibus bill quickly landed on Healey’s desk, checking off another one of the items legislative leaders failed to complete before they adjourned formal sessions on the morning of Aug. 1.
They’ve now completed work on two big bills during informal sessions. Healey last week signed into law the first August breakthrough, a maternal health improvement bill.
At a ceremonial signing for that bill Monday, one of the lead negotiators, Sen. Cindy Friedman, suggested the blowback to the Legislature’s unfinished business has been overdone.
“It’s really amazing what we can do when we sit down and talk to each other. I’d also like to point out — we got this done. The Legislature got this done,” she said, drawing applause. “So despite the deadlines the Boston Globe seems to impose on everybody, we are still working in this building.”
The press — us included — undoubtedly made a big deal about how much the Legislature did not finish before they adjourned that July 31-into-Aug. 1 session, but to be clear, the lawmakers themselves were the ones who first circled the date by crafting a legislative rule calling for even-year formals to end by July 31. And they clearly had trouble reaching agreements despite staying up all night.
Maybe the takeaway here is that the House and Senate no longer think of July 31 as the hard deadline they once did. If major bills can emerge from conference committees in August or later and still make it to the governor’s desk, is there any material reason they need to be done by July?
Conventional wisdom says legislative leaders risk a bill failing during an informal session because a single objection can stall it, but so far, Republicans backed many of the underlying bills and are mostly content to let overdue compromises sail through. Even when the GOP objected to some shelter funding during a stretch of informals last fall, Democrats circumvented any issue after a few days by calling in enough members to constitute a quorum. For the record, there’s not even close to a quorum on hand for the vast majority of informals.
The lead House negotiator on the new maternal health law, Rep. Marjorie Decker, faces a primary challenge against Evan MacKay that’s drawn a lot of attention. In the same vein, the House this week quietly gave approval to a Martha’s Vineyard real estate transfer tax bill backed by Rep. Dylan Fernandes, who figures to face a heated general election challenging for an open Senate seat.
Decker is one of only 18 sitting lawmakers who face a primary opponent. Altogether, just 26 House races and six Senate races — about one in six of the Legislature as a whole — have any kind of contest Tuesday.
Some of the bigger action could be further up the ballot, such as the three-way GOP primary to challenge U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren or the Governor’s Council rematch between Mara Dolan and Marilyn Petitto Devaney.
ODDS AND ENDS: … Boston’s hotel sector could soon face thousands of workers on strike amid unsuccessful contract negotiations … The life sciences industry, long a cornerstone of the Massachusetts economy, reports facing some headwinds including a record vacancy rate for lab space … State tax collections in August buzzed past August 2023 levels after a comparably sluggish July … A pilot program expanding access to lower-cost Massachusetts Health Connector plans has already reached more than 50,000 newly eligible people … And ahead of the Sept. 1 move-in bonanza, the state’s Department of Conservation and Recreation launched another gem of a social-media campaign, this time using horror-movie tropes to warn about “Storrowed” trucks.
STORY OF THE WEEK: A major turning point approaches for both the Steward Health Care crisis and for campaign season.
SONG OF THE WEEK: Nashoba Valley Medical Center will close Saturday morning, but the Healey administration revealed talks with UMass Memorial Health about using the campus in some capacity. Is it gone for good, or coming back around?
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08/30/2024