Norwood Hospital was done in by inadequate state regulations. Here is the fix.

 

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Norwood Hospital was done in by inadequate state regulations. Here is the fix.   May 10, 2026 By Meredith McGee

For the second time in two years, Massachusetts is considering whether it needs to seize hospital land by force just to get a community its health care back. In February, state legislators held a hearing on taking the Norwood Hospital property by eminent domain, the same tool the state used at St. Elizabeth’s Medical Center in Brighton at a cost of $66 million to taxpayers. For Norwood, six years into a flood-related closure that never had to happen, it remains the only option available.

That fact alone should tell us something is broken. Not because eminent domain is the wrong call for Norwood, but because a state that regulates its utilities, its transit systems, and its energy grid with layers of intermediate oversight has no equivalent tools for hospital infrastructure. When a community loses its hospital, the state can wait or it can seize. There is nothing in between. And that is the problem, because eminent domain is not a health care policy. It is what a state resorts to when it has no other tools left.

There’s a way to fill that gap. A bill before the Legislature would create receivership authority for hospitals, modeled on what Massachusetts already uses when a utility fails its customers, and would give the state a middle option between waiting and seizing.

Before the floodwaters rushed in, Norwood Hospital was a profitable community hospital serving roughly 126,000 patients a year, generating $25 million in profit, and running at 81 percent bed occupancy, well above the statewide average.

Its emergency department handled nearly 40,000 visits a year, funneling patients to a catheterization lab that anchored cardiac care for the surrounding region. Its psychiatric unit was the only inpatient behavioral health facility in the area, treating patients from more than a dozen communities with nowhere else to be admitted.

Norwood Hospital did not fail. It was failed.

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