On a busy strip of Dorchester Avenue in Boston, there’s a hole in the community where a hospital used to be.
Carney Hospital, the community mainstay that traced its roots to South Boston in 1863, closed its doors for good in August, leaving generations of patients who depended on it for care scrambling to find other options.
Carney, along with Nashoba Valley Medical Center in Ayer, which also closed in August, were both casualties of the bankruptcy of Dallas-based Steward Health Care, a company whose name has now become synonymous with the perils of private-equity health care.
Three months after doctors at Carney and Nashoba treated their final patients, and nearly two months after Steward sold off its remaining properties in the Bay State, Massachusetts officials and policymakers are still sifting through the rubble of its collapse.
Here’s a little bit of what that looks like:
Patients who used to get care at Steward-owned hospitals, including Nashoba, are turning to other facilities, putting more stress on already strained hospitals and emergency rooms.
In Dorchester, the nonprofit Health Care for All sent canvassers into the streets to help residents understand what happened to the hospital and what might come next for the sprawling property, according to the local Dorchester Reporter.
Meanwhile, a working group convened by Mayor Michelle Wu is studying the impact of Carney’s closing and is expected to issue its recommendations early next year.
Carney’s closing has “left critical gaps in access to care,” Wu said in an October statement announcing the group’s formation, adding that officials must “act quickly to address the future of quality health care on this site and bring community members together to reimagine and strengthen access.”
On Beacon Hill, a bill intended to avert a future Steward-style meltdown remains tied up in a joint House and Senate conference committee, with the clock running down on the current two-year legislative session.
House Speaker Ronald J. Mariano, D-3rd Norfolk, has said he’s “pretty confident” lawmakers will get a finished bill onto Gov. Maura Healey’s desk before the lights go out.
On Capitol Hill, federal lawmakers, including Democratic U.S. Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey are raising concerns about the private-equity-owned firm that’s taken over Steward’s physicians’ network.
Both lawmakers have raised concerns about the continuity of care now that Rural Healthcare, a subsidiary of the private equity firm Kinderhook Industries LLC, has taken over the network formerly known as Stewardship Health.
Markey, in particular, has said he fears that “the same Stewardship executives who drove that health care provider into the ground will now take the reins” at the newly christened Revere Medical.
“These executives should not be permitted to fail up and place in jeopardy another health care provider on which Massachusetts residents will come to rely,” Markey wrote in a Nov. 25 letter to Rural Healthcare CEO Benson Sloan.
And the Healey administration?
Speaking to WCVB-TV in Boston on Sunday state Health and Human Services Secretary Kate Walsh acknowledged the health care challenges posed by Steward’s bankruptcy.
But she stopped short of the same blanket condemnation of private equity ownership of hospitals made by Warren and others. The Cambridge Democrat has compared the firms to “vampires.”
“I think that private equity is a mechanism for people to access capital,” Walsh told the station’s “On the Record” program. “And we have a health care system that has to change. It has to innovate. We have to find better ways to serve people.”
The Bay State’s biotech and life sciences sectors are “funded by venture and private” interests, so “any blanket statement doesn’t make sense.”
Steward’s other former Massachusetts hospitals, including Good Samaritan Medical Center in Brockton and St. Elizabeth’s Medical Center in Brighton, have been sold and are in the hands of new owners.
Among them is Rhode Island-based Lifespan Health System, which took over Morton Hospital in Taunton and Saint Anne’s Hospital in Fall River in a $175 million deal.
The company’s president and CEO, John Fernandez, has pronounced himself “confident our team has the experience and know-how to rebuild the infrastructure of these two hospitals and operate them as successful and thriving not-for-profit organizations.”
Still, at least one Massachusetts lawmaker is taking a wait-and-see approach to whether that prediction will come true.
“While there’s been this scramble to arrange sort of these shotgun weddings, where a so-called healthy hospital will take over one of these wounded or dysfunctional hospitals, it’s too soon to tell whether these shotgun marriages will allow us to maintain a system that reliably and adequately meets the needs of our community,” U.S. Rep. Stephen Lynch, D-8th District, told the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce earlier this month.
Speaking to WCVB-TV, Walsh, the Healey administration official, disagreed with Lynch’s “shotgun marriage” characterization of the scramble to find new owners, calling it “a reflection of his Irish wit.”
And, then, perhaps speaking for the Bay Staters who lived through Steward’s collapse and are still waiting to come through the other side, she noted that it’s “still hard work.”
As are most things. But in health care — especially.
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