From today’s State House News Service:
Secretary of Health and Human Services JudyAnn Bigby downplayed what some senators only hours earlier declared was a looming fiscal crisis for the state’s hospitals. Asked whether the state was on the verge of a crisis of hospital closures, Bigby told the News Service, “no we’re not.” Ways and Means Chairman Steven Panagiotakos earlier today said some hospitals faced “closing their doors for mental health patients” if the Legislature failed to pass immediately a $9.5 million appropriations bill, which it did just after 4 pm today. Sen. Gale Candaras warned that one distressed Western Massachusetts hospital was on the verge of shutting down. “If that hospital were to close, there would be hundreds and hundreds of jobs lost and hundreds and hundreds of patients with nowhere to go and hundreds of methadone patients out looking for heroin on the street,” she said. Asked about Panagiotakos’s statement, Bigby simply said, “I respect his opinion … some of the hospitals are less well off than others.” She noted that there was increased pressure on hospitals because they had received lesser funding than in previous years. The $9.5 million appropriation, now on the governor’s desk, would bolster the state’s Essential Community Provider Fund. The fund, which received $28 million in the fiscal year 2008 budget, was established to “enhance the ability of hospitals and community health centers to serve populations in need.” The secretary of health and human services administers the grants provided by the fund.
Get the feeling there’s more here than meets the eye?
