Rep. Lori Trahan calls for more transparency in the wake of Steward hospital closures
BOSTON - Congresswoman Lori Trahan (D-Third District) said she's determined to keep two Steward Health Care-owned hospitals in Massachusetts from permanently closing as she called for more regulation to keep this from happening again.
Trying to keep hospitals open
"We cannot let them run away from this mess that they created," said Trahan of Steward Health Care, the operators of multiple Massachusetts hospitals who ran them into the ground before entering bankruptcy proceedings.
Most of the facilities have found new buyers. But two hospitals – Dorchester's Carney Hospital, and the Nashoba Valley Medical Center in Ayer, part of Trahan's district – are set to close this weekend after new operators did not immediately surface.
"What Steward unfortunately did was they didn't really leave us a lot of time between when they declared bankruptcy and when they announced their intention to close these hospitals, and the bankruptcy court judge in this case green-lighted that, which really dealt us a bad hand," says Trahan on the Sunday morning edition of "Keller At Large." "What we've shifted from is how are we going to prevent the closure of Nashoba Valley to how are we going to work to ensure that this hospital reopens under new ownership as quickly as possible?"
The affected hospitals were operated by an arm of the Catholic Archdiocese back in 2010 when financial problems prompted their sale to a hedge fund allied with Steward, a move approved by then-Attorney General Martha Coakley and seconded later on by her successor, current Governor Maura Healey.
What lessons we can learn
As for lessons learned from the debacle, which threatens to leave thousands of patients stranded without convenient access to health care, Trahan notes: "When you have a private equity business model in health care, what you give up is transparency, the ability to watch the business decisions and the moves that these bad actors - in the case of Steward – committed…They sold the land right out from underneath their hospitals and right away took multi-million-dollar dividend checks while these exorbitant rent bills started to stack up. They knew they were driving this hospital into the ground, and they did it anyway. They knew it was bad for patients. They knew it was bad for providers and the community, and they didn't care as they maximized their profits. And so you can have regulation in place, but really what we're learning is that we don't have enough transparency to regulate something that we can't see."
Trahan also discussed the prospects of Congress passing stricter privacy rules for social media operators, and how the selection of Vice President Kamala Harris as the Democratic nominee has changed the race for president.