Roger Williams Medical Center

And it's not just at the, I mean, you know, I complain about the primary care thing because I've had a hard time finding a primary care doctor.

But it's also a huge crisis at our hospitals because two of the hospitals here in Providence, Roger Williams Hospital and Fatima Hospital, have been in dire financial straits for years.

And the two hospitals recently were purchased after their previous operator declared bankruptcy with the help of $11 or $18 million in public funds, where basically the state of Rhode Island gave this company CharterCare $18 million, and they promised, okay, no, now we will restore care, and we will improve the systems, and it will be good now because you gave us that money for us to use.

And included in, of course, these negotiations was a claim that they would continue not only to improve conditions, but they would work with the unions that already have existing agreements and that they wouldn't go against any of that.

Uh-huh.

Now that the sale has closed, however, they're just tearing all that shit up.

So during testimony justifying public money for the sale, CharterCare pledged to specifically invest $100,000 in order to maintain the existing home health care service that has been operated at Roger Williams and Fatima up until now.

However, as reported by excellent local independent reporter Steve Alquist, UNAP has been forced to call out the fact that, hey, remember when they said they were going to spend that money to keep the home health care system operating? Well, guess what? They just pulled us all into a meeting and said they're going to close the home health system down entirely.

We talked about his accomplishments.

The first one he cited was getting an escrow account to help Our Lady of Fatima and the Roger Williams Medical Center when they were in crisis.

And he talked about his regrets, too, that having a Twitter fight with Judge Prococini and that he wishes he had chosen his words differently there.

Big shoes to fill, obviously, whoever.