Hospitals across Massachusetts have reported financial struggles over the last year, most recently the bankruptcy of the Steward Hospitals in eastern Mass. But state lawmakers ended their formal sessions two weeks ago without passing laws to help make sure this kind of thing doesn't happen again. Colin Young, a reporter at the State House News Service, explains the latest on the Steward situation.
Colin Young, SHNS: The latest with Steward is that we're moving towards a really significant hearing [now rescheduled for Friday] in U.S. Bankruptcy Court. And at that point, Steward is expected to present the judge with the best and final bids that it has for five of its hospitals in Massachusetts. These are the five that Steward says got qualified or viable bids from new operators.
And this could be the chance for the judge to give his blessing to these transactions. That would result in Steward no longer operating hospitals in Massachusetts. And these new operators, some of which we expect to be companies already running hospitals in Massachusetts and other New England states, they are going to be expanding their footprints in some cases. Really, it's going to be a reshaping of how healthcare is delivered.
Carrie Healy, NEPM: And lawmakers wanted to have some part in that with some legislation to shape how health care is delivered. What happened to that?
Yes. When this whole crisis took off this spring, Massachusetts lawmakers said they wanted to do something to make sure something like this could never happen again. Of course, that was one of the many things that didn't get accomplished by the end of their formal sessions. And actually, it was the House speaker, Ron Mariano, who took that bill off the table and he basically said it was too important for it to be caught up in all of the hubbub at the end of their session. So that's still lingering out there.
The state hasn't done anything to prevent this type of situation. There is some optimism among House leadership, at least, that this is something that could sort of sail through in informal sessions without much debate that could be on their fall agenda. But it really is up in the air.
As you say, the end of formal sessions for that two-year term does leave a lot of loose ends that get mopped up during informal sessions. Apparently lawmakers are still working on compromise bills covering maternal health, also energy infrastructure and more. But are they any closer to deals?
It doesn't seem like it in the 10 days after formal sessions ended, things really reverted to a sort of vacation feel at the Statehouse. And the lawmakers that we were able to talk to were still talking with the same optimism that things could get done. But there's been no signs that they've actually had the meetings or had breakthroughs, to really change the landscape from where it was in the early morning hours of August 1.
State Auditor Diana DiZoglio, herself a former lawmaker, had some pretty harsh assessments of the Legislature's work this term. What did she say and was any of that surprising?
What DiZoglio said is that the end of formal sessions and sort of the messy way it all came to an end was not surprising to her. And she says that the House and Senate operate a broken system, one that shuts too many people out of the process.
It wasn't terribly surprising. She's been a critic of the House and Senate going back to her time in each branch. And now she's also leading a campaign to push for a ballot question this fall that would give her, as auditor, the explicit authority to audit the House and Senate.
So she has been sort of waging a campaign against the House and Senate for a couple of years now, but the way that House and Senate Democrats ended their session without compromising on really significant issues that matter to a lot of people across the state, it just gave the auditor even more ammunition to go to voters and say [something like], "Look, this isn't working. You should give me the power to really investigate them more thoroughly."
Colin, you mentioned to me earlier that reporter colleagues at the State House News Service have been talking amongst themselves about an upcoming event that's going to be held in the Senate chamber. And we're not talking about lawmaking.
Yeah, this one's really interesting to me. The Senate chamber, the historic 1798 chamber that is directly under the Statehouse's gold dome, this week is going to be hosting a theatrical production, a show called "A Light Under the Dome."
Fittingly, what's really interesting about this production is that the play itself takes place in the same room where the show is being staged. The show revolves around an 1838 speech that a suffragist and abolitionist gave in what was, at the time, the House of Representatives chamber, which is now the Senate chamber. The events themselves took place in the very room where people will be watching this play.
