FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

August 20, 2026

Press Contact:

Vincent Errichetti

(617) 922-1824

Press@johndeatonforsenate.com

Massachusetts has been losing hospitals and essential services. Too many career politicians treat that as someone else’s problem.

A hospital closure is not a policy abstraction. It is a longer ambulance ride, a delayed diagnosis, and a family that must travel farther for care that used to be nearby.

Don’t get pregnant in North Central Massachusetts or have a heart attack in Norwood or the region.

Carney Hospital in Dorchester and Nashoba Valley Medical Center in Ayer closed in 2024. Norwood Hospital has been shuttered for years after flooding and the collapse of its operator. Other facilities have closed maternity wards and other units that communities depended on. These are not distant rural stories. They are happening in Massachusetts cities and towns, in places where working families already struggle with housing, energy bills, and the cost of living.

Healthcare is one of the issues people raise with me everywhere I go. They are not asking for slogans. They want to know why care is getting harder and more expensive to obtain, and why officials who have been in office for decades keep insisting that everything is under control.

It is not. A hospital closure does not merely remove beds. It eliminates jobs, overloads the hospitals that remain, and leaves the most vulnerable patients with fewer options. When maternity units close, women travel farther to give birth. When emergency rooms disappear, minutes matter. When a community loses its hospital, the damage lasts for years.

Politicians in Washington and on Beacon Hill have had every chance to treat this as the crisis it is. Instead the public gets hearings after the fact, statements of concern, and the same cycle: private operators fail, taxpayers absorb the cost, and the people who needed the hospital are told to go somewhere else. That is not leadership. It is neglect.

Massachusetts deserves more than managed decline. It needs transparency about how these systems are financed and why they keep failing. It needs accountability when operators collapse and the public is left holding the bill. It needs officials who will fight to keep care in communities rather than declare the losses inevitable.

I did not come up through the political machine. I came up through the Marine Corps and through representing people who had been hurt and ignored. I have heard too many families describe what it means when the nearest hospital is gone. They are not interested in another decade of the same excuses.

If Washington can spend without limit, it can demand that Massachusetts families have hospitals they can actually reach. Healthcare, housing, energy, and affordability are not separate files. They are the same question: whether government works for the people who live here, or for the people who have occupied office the longest.

Voters deserve answers. They deserve a Senate that treats hospital closures as an emergency, not a footnote. Massachusetts cannot keep losing hospitals while the people in charge look the other way.

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