Steward Health Care’s dire financial footing and allegedly unpaid bills exploded into the public spotlight this month, but hospital system officials had been warning about inadequate funding supports that put community hospitals at risk since at least last year.
Steward owns nine hospitals in Massachusetts, including Good Samaritan in Brockton, Morton in Taunton, St. Anne’s in Fall River and Norwood Hospital, which is closed due to flood issues.
When Steward submitted testimony to the Health Policy Commission for the autumn cost trends hearing, it urged policymakers “to make bold actions to correct a hospital marketplace that has been functionally broken since the 1990s.”
The four pages of material made no explicit reference of the scope of the problems Steward faces, which now include reports that it’s $50 million behind on rent and lawsuits over unpaid bills to vendors. They did, however, raise some of the same points the company’s leadership has been arguing in the past two weeks.
“Consolidation and predatory business practices has resulted in a two-tiered system of health care where brand and market power allow a select few provider systems to leech the vast majority of health care resources in the Commonwealth,” Steward wrote in its cost trends hearing testimony. “The remaining community hospitals are forced to increasingly do more with less. In order to break this paradigm, the Commonwealth needs to make major disruptive actions that solve market failure in the present as well as structurally for the future.”