On Saturday, Aug. 31, the Carney Hospital in Dorchester closed its doors — most likely forever.
An institution with an incredibly rich history, the Carney was originally established in South Boston in 1863, and later moved to Dorchester in 1953. Up until its closure, the Carney provided essential healthcare services to the local community, from a busy emergency room to specialty healthcare services. With around 150 beds, 70 of which were psychiatric, the hospital gave Boston’s largest and most diverse neighborhood accessible medical assistance for nearly 71 years. Generations of families received healthcare from and worked for the hospital, cementing it as a locale for community support and unity.
In the beginning of May, the news broke that Steward Health Care, a massive for-profit health system that has owned and operated healthcare centers across the country filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Amassing a staggering $9 billion dollars in debt, Steward announced that all 31 of its hospitals would be put up for sale — but the Carney Hospital, in addition to the Nashoba Valley Hospital in Ayer, were to be closed.
Claiming that there were “no qualified bids,” meaning that no bidders were deemed capable to take over the hospitals functions due to a lack of financial competency, Steward made a suspicious and dangerous decision. In doing so, Steward breached a Massachusetts state law that requires a 120-day notice of closure to the state Department of Public Health.
Out of the 1,243 Steward employees who were laid off at the end of August, 753 worked at the Carney. In 2022, the hospital reported 31,000 emergency room visits and 63,000 outpatient visits, showing the public’s reliance on its services. But now, a giant void has been left in Dorchester — a neighborhood that has been classified as a “pharmaceutical desert,” an area where most residents live at least a half-mile away from the closest drugstore and don’t have cars to make the trip. Thus, the closing of the Carney has left its patients seeking healthcare services elsewhere, turning to other hospitals and community healthcare centers, which are now experiencing an influx of people in need.
Dorchester has become another casualty in the historic assault of privatized healthcare on working class, impoverished and mostly non-white communities. Most hospitals in the United States are privately owned, because in capitalist America, there is no limit to what can be profited off of.
Studies have shown that with the privatization of healthcare comes the cutting of corners to garner more profits, a practice that Steward heavily engaged in. By refusing to maintain its hospital’s infrastructure, especially the Carney’s, longtime patients and employees had seen the building fall into a state of disrepair.
For a while now, the Carney has struggled with being a private hospital in a predominately low-income area. With a reported 70% of its patients on Medicaid, the facility has never been able to turn a profit in the way that hospitals supporting patients with private insurance do. Medicare and Medicaid do not reimburse healthcare providers with nearly enough of the amount that private insurance does. In 2023, the Carney’s nurses were offered a year-long contract from Steward in their bargaining efforts, while their counterparts at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Brighton received a multi-year proposal.
Evidently, alarm bells have been going off for quite some time prior to Steward’s announcement of bankruptcy and hospital closures. It’s just that the struggles of Brown, Black, working-class, and impoverished peoples are deeply woven into the fabric of for-profit healthcare in the United States — and these communities constantly get the short end of the stick.
Naturally, with the news of the Steward’s bankruptcy came an outpour of public outrage and confusion about the Carney’s future from the local community and the city at large. In the wake of the impending chaos, Massachusetts state governor Maura Healey announced that the state would use the power of eminent domain to pass St. Elizabeth’s operations to a new owner, and ensure that four other formally Steward-run hospitals would be taken over by other medical groups. However, when met with calls to save the Carney and Nashoba, Gov. Healey maintained that there was simply nothing the state could do because Steward did not accept any offers for either hospital.
Thus, the Boston’s governmental services were tasked with handling the fallout of the Carney’s closure, and that responsibility was led by the Boston Public Health Commission. Dr. Ojikutu, the BPHC Commissioner and Executive Director, said that “under state law, we as a city have no regulatory authority over hospitals, no licensure authority, and there was no operator, and no money to purchase the hospital [the Carney].”
In the case of employing the power of eminent domain, a suggestion made by many people, the city itself simply cannot afford to purchase the Carney’s property or building and does not have the means to operate it.
“When you take eminent domain, the major piece of that is that you pay for the hospital and the land … Even if you’re paying market price for it — and that’s what you have to do — that’s a lot of money, and we as a city don’t have the money to pay for it,” said Dr. Ojikutu. He went on to explain the rarity of city-run public hospitals, which is largely due to the widespread privatization of hospital networks.
The root of this problem is the for-profit healthcare system, born out of the contours of capitalism. The road leading up to the closure of the Carney and the subsequential fallout is proof that America’s healthcare system fails already vulnerable populations. Losing the Carney did more than just exasperate the lack of medical care in Dorchester — it knocked down a historical pillar of the local community, changing Boston forever.
