Lynch confident about taking Norwood Hospital

Congressman Stephen Lynch sat down with Norwood Town Republican Committee President and Norwood Community Media Host Kevin Broderick recently to discuss the situation at the Norwood Hospital.

The show wasn’t billed as a deep dive on Norwood Hospital, but they ran out of time mostly before getting to talk about anything else.

Lynch’s focus was on the state legislature’s bill to take the hospital by eminent domain from the current property holder, Medical Properties Trust (MPT).

Just for some background, Steward ran Norwood Hospital up until 2020 when a catastrophic flood left the building in shambles. Steward then imploded in 2024, about midway through the construction of the new hospital shell. The company’s landlord, MPT – a private equity firm specializing in renting out medical faculties to medical operators for profit – then took over the construction of the project when Steward ran out of money. Since that time, MPT has completed the construction of the hospital shell – the outside of the building, about 18 months worth of work still needs to be done once an operator takes over the site – and its associate parking garage, but, as Lynch said in the interview, nothing’s really changed since then.

“We are trying to negotiate with them to turn Norwood Hospital back into a not-for-profit hospital, as it was under its previous ownership, and also we’re trying to get a licensed facility to come in and run it as a full-service, acute care hospital,” he said. “There were two main bidders – hospitals of interest in our area that were interested in coming in and taking over, rebuilding and operating Norwood Hospital. That process is still ongoing.”

Lynch said MPT has been a bit stubborn to say the least.

“They want way too much money to purchase it, and so right now, with the great help of Rogers and Rush, they put forward legislation to do an eminent domain taking,” he said.

The Town is currently looking to do its own eminent domain taking if the state taking fails. Go to https://gvimes.link/hospitaltaking for more information on that.

But Lynch said he’s very confident in the state legislation, as well as Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey, who said if the bill comes before her desk, she would sign it.

“We testified in front of the legislature, it’s moved out of committee, and it’s actually moving a lot faster than a lot of other bills do, and so I’m very proud of the way Rogers and Rush [State Rep. John Rogers and Sen. Michael Rush, whose districts include Norwood] handled this,” he said. “The Governor seems very supportive of this and getting Norwood Hospital back online. I think that’s the fastest route of getting control of the property; putting it back in the hands of the people of Norwood and getting this project completed. It’s a great location, in terms of servicing not only Norwood, but Westwood, Dedham and Walpole. There was a catchment area of 250,000 people who got their healthcare at Norwood Hospital. And those people right now have no hospital.”

Broderick asked Lynch if he would prefer no hospital to a for-profit hospital. Lynch said yes, but he doubted that would happen.

“If you have people with limitless funds, they’re all billionaires, they probably have no problem buying their healthcare from a for-profit hospital, but I find very few of them,” he said, noting the issue with for-profit hospitals. “You want that hospital to be focused on you and your healthcare, not on whether the investors are getting a return on their investment.”

Lynch said the current status quo is only “good” for hospitals currently experiencing overflowing capacity, which is called boardings (and that’s good for the hospital’s bottom line, nothing else). He said, “It used to be that hospitals putting patients out into the halls to wait for care instead of a hospital room was illegal, but it’s been sliding since the state lost so many hospital beds in Norwood Hospital, Carney Hospital (Dorchester), and the Nashoba Valley Hospital (Ayer). And that means that hospitals get to service more patients than they would normally be legally allowed to.”

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“It used to be a violation for a hospital to board people,” he said. “They put you on a cot in the hallway outside the emergency room and you wait until a bed becomes available.

“If you have a hospital with a license for 300 beds, if you have 100 people out in the corridor, you’ve got a license for 400 beds and you’re making money,” he said. “They’re making more money than they would otherwise make.”

Lynch said these boardings are becoming even more common.

“Mass General – which is one of the best hospitals in the country – just had its largest number of boardings in the hospital’s history, and they started in the 1800s,” he said. “They had 130 people waiting for a bed to open up. So if we’ve got 400 beds at Norwood Hospital, that would take a lot of pressure off of the other hospitals.”

To see the full interview, go to https://gvimes.link/lynchbroderick