August 22, 2024— While Massachusetts residents were recently found to have the second-highest life expectancy in the country, major health disparities still plague the state—and could widen if vulnerable patients lose access to the hospitals and health centers they’ve relied on, according to experts from Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
In an August 21 GBH article, Asaf Bitton, executive director of Ariadne Labs and associate professor of health care policy, said that state officials should work to ensure that hospitals owned by Steward Health Care—the for-profit health care system that owned nine hospitals across Massachusetts and declared bankruptcy in May—remain open.
“It isn’t like, ‘Oh, just go up to Boston, go over to the next big health system.’ We’re talking about people who might take two or three buses, who have mobility issues, who might just have had a relationship with that doctor, that health system, those teams for 20, 30 years that you can’t just sort of build overnight,” Bitton said.
“It’s critical that the state regulators and policymakers … do everything possible to ensure the viability of these health systems in the communities that they serve, because closure of health systems that serve as safety nets in vulnerable populations are associated with worse outcomes one, two, three years down the road,” he continued.
John McDonough, professor of the practice of public health, recently discussed the latest news on Steward’s bankruptcy in the August 11 episode of “The Codcast,” CommonWealth Beacon’s podcast. In the episode, titled “What’s next for Steward’s hospitals?” he also shared the fate of health care policy measures in the recently ended Massachusetts legislative session.
Read the GBH article: Massachusetts ranks 2nd in nation for life expectancy. But massive gaps remain, experts say.
Listen to The Codcast episode: What’s next for Steward’s hospitals?
Learn more
How for-profit medicine is harming health care (Harvard Chan School news)
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