Events

Event Description

Reality of Care: What Happens When Hospitals Merge

What happens to a community’s care when two hospitals become one? How do two workforces build a single culture? And who is accountable for the outcome? This panel event takes up these questions through three lenses: policy and politics, operational leadership, and economics. Assemblymember Marianne Buttenschon, who has represented Utica and Rome in Albany since 2019, offers the view from the state legislature. Dr. William LeCates, President/CEO of Mohawk Valley Health System (MVHS), speaks from inside the organization. Professor Eliane Barker, a health economist who has studied how hospital mergers affect patients, shares evidence on how consolidation affects the people it serves.

In October 2023, MVHS closed St. Elizabeth Medical Center and Faxton St. Luke’s Healthcare and moved their acute care and emergency services into the new Wynn Hospital in downtown Utica, a project supported by a $300 million state grant. The panelists will discuss what that consolidation has meant for patients, staff, and the Mohawk Valley, and what public investment and oversight has meant to the communities they serve.

Marianne Buttenschon, EdD, has represented the 119th Assembly District, which includes Utica and Rome, in the New York State Assembly since 2019 and is retiring at the end of her term this year. A former dean of Public Service and Emergency Preparedness at Mohawk Valley Community College, she chairs the Assembly Committee on Small Business and has sponsored or co-sponsored legislation on safe staffing, health care worker protections, and emergency medical services.

William W. LeCates, MD, is President and CEO of Mohawk Valley Health System, a role he assumed in October 2025 after serving as the system’s chief operating officer and maintaining a limited clinical practice in internal medicine and nephrology. A graduate of Amherst College and the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, he previously led Bassett Medical Center as president and chief operating officer, and he serves as a colonel in the New York Army National Guard.

Eliane Barker, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Economics at Hamilton College, where she teaches econometrics, industrial organization, and the economics of healthcare policy. An applied microeconomist with a PhD from Queen’s University, she studies the effects of government-directed hospital mergers on patients, along with urgent care entry and non-profit organizations.