WATERTOWN, N.Y. — Assemblyman Scott Gray (R, Watertown) issued the following statement following last week’s public hearings on the North Star Health Alliance service closures held in Carthage, Ogdensburg and Watertown:

Last week our communities showed up, and I was there with them. I attended all three hearings, in Carthage, Ogdensburg, and Watertown, where hundreds of North Country neighbors filled the rooms to speak for the care that keeps their families healthy and close to home. They spoke about the primary care clinics that catch illness early, about the labor and delivery services that welcome the next generation, about women’s health and maternal care, and about the orthopedic care that so many families have relied on for decades.

I heard nurses who love their patients. I heard mothers, and the people who care for them. I heard longtime patients describe what it means to lose a place that has served them their whole lives. And I heard a community of people who are not willing to accept that their health is worth less because of where they live.

Accessibility is not an abstraction in the North Country; it is a matter of age, of distance, and of time. Our population is older than the state as a whole, and for many of our seniors a long drive to a distant facility is not simply an inconvenience, it is a barrier that stands between them and the care they need. For families without reliable transportation, that barrier is higher still. And nowhere is it more serious than in the care of mothers and newborns, where the miles between a laboring mother and a delivery room can be the difference between a safe arrival and a tragedy. When we ask people to travel farther for critical, time-sensitive care, we are not merely consolidating services, we are putting lives at risk.

The people at these hearings are right. Rural health care is difficult to deliver and it is expensive to sustain. That has never made it any less important. A family in upstate New York deserves the same access to care as a family in any metropolitan community downstate. Equal accessibility to healthcare is not a regional courtesy, it is a fundamental expectation, and the passion in those rooms this week made that expectation impossible to ignore.

I have asked the Department of Health to give full and strong consideration to every comment offered at these hearings, and to listen to the audio of each session before any decision is made. The people of the North Country were clear, and I stand with them. Care in our region should be preserved, strengthened, and kept close to the people who depend on it. I will carry that determination forward, in Albany and at home, for as long as it takes.