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BOSTON (AP) — The Massachusetts Senate approved a bill Thursday aimed in part at addressing some of the issues raised after Steward Health Care said it plans to sell off all its hospitals after announcing in May that it filed for bankruptcy protection.

Democratic Sen. Cindy Friedman, Senate chair of the Joint Committee on Health Care Financing, said the bill is meant to address the state’s struggling health care system, which she said is putting patients and providers at risk.

“Most concerning of all is that we have lost the patient and their needs as the primary focus of the health care system,” she said. “The recent events concerning Steward Health system have exacerbated a preexisting crisis across all aspects of the system. They may not have been the cause, but they certainly are the poster child.”

Friedman said the bill significantly updates and strengthens the state’s tools to safeguard the health care system by focusing on the major players in the health care market — including providers, insurers, pharmaceutical manufacturers and for-profit investment firms — to ensure that patient needs come first.

The bill would expand the authority of state agencies charged with measuring and containing health care costs and strengthen the health care market review process with the goal of stabilizing the system.

The bill would also limit the amount of debt a provider or provider organization in which a private equity firm has a financial interest can take on; update programs aimed at constraining health care costs and improving care quality; and require that for-profit health care companies submit additional information on corporate structure, financials and portfolio companies to the state’s Health Policy Commission.

The commission is an independent state agency designed to advance a more transparent, accountable and equitable health care system through data-driven policy recommendations, according to state officials.

The House has already approved their version of the bill. Both chambers will now have to come up with a single compromise bill to send to Gov. Maura Healey.

The debate comes as questions loom about the future of hospitals owned by Steward Health Care.

The Dallas-based company, which operates more than 30 hospitals nationwide, has said it plans to sell off all its hospitals after announcing in May that it filed for bankruptcy protection. The company said it does not expect any interruptions in its hospitals’ day-to-day operations throughout the Chapter 11 process.

Steward has eight hospitals in Massachusetts including St. Elizabeth’s Hospital and Carney Hospital, both in Boston.

Also Thursday, U.S. Sens. Edward Markey and Bernie Sanders said the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions plans to vote next week to subpoena Steward CEO Dr. Ralph de la Torre.

In a written statement, Markey and Sanders pointed to what they described as “a dysfunctional and cruel health care system that is designed not to make patients well, but to make executives extraordinarily wealthy.”

“There could not be a clearer example of that than private equity vultures on Wall Street making a fortune by taking over hospitals, stripping their assets, and lining their own pockets,” they said, adding, “Working with private equity forces, Dr. de la Torre became obscenely wealthy by loading up hospitals from Massachusetts to Arizona with billions in debt and sold the land underneath these hospitals to real estate executives who charge unsustainably high rent.”

A spokesperson for Steward Health Care did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

ABILENE – CNBC reports that just off of Interstate 20, in the heart of West Texas, is a town of 125,000 people called Abilene. Once a stopping point along a cross-country cattle trail in the days of the American Old West, the small outpost is now getting into the burgeoning artificial intelligence business. Houston-based tech company Lancium and Denver-based Crusoe Energy Systems announced on Thursday morning a multibillion-dollar deal to build a 200-megawatt data center just outside Abilene that is designed to “meet the unique needs of AI companies” — such as enabling advanced cloud computing for applications like medical research and aircraft design. It is the first phase of a larger 1.2-gigawatt build-out.

Lancium President Ali Fenn told CNBC that at full capacity, this will be one of the largest AI data center campuses in the world, in the latest example that the race to power AI — and leave bitcoin mining behind — is accelerating. “Data centers are rapidly evolving to support modern AI workloads, requiring new levels of high-density rack space, direct-to-chip liquid cooling and unprecedented overall energy demands,” said Chase Lochmiller, Crusoe’s co-founder and CEO. There are a lot of synergies between the bitcoin mining and AI infrastructure businesses. Mining firms have expansive data centers, with access to fiber lines and large amounts of power across the U.S. They’re exactly the types of facilities needed for compute-intensive AI operations, which means their sites and technology are in high demand. Meanwhile, miners need to diversify. Following the bitcoin halving in April, an event that happens about once every four years, the business of generating new tokens has become much less profitable. JPMorgan Chase analysts wrote in a report in June that “some operators are feeling the financial pinch from the recent block reward halving, which cut industry revenues in half, and are actively exploring exit strategies.”

AUSTIN (AP) — The largest housing provider for unaccompanied migrant children has been accused of “severe, pervasive, and unwelcome sexual abuse of and harassment” of children in its care, the Justice Department said Thursday.

A federal complaint filed in Austin, Texas, alleges that Southwest Key employees, including supervisors, have abused children in its care since at least 2015. Alleged offenses include rape, touching and soliciting sex and nude photos.

Southwest Key, based in Austin, is the largest provider of housing to unaccompanied migrant children, operating under grants from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. It has 29 child migrant shelters: 17 in Texas, 10 in Arizona and two in California.

The Associated Press left a message with the company seeking comment Thursday.

DALLAS – The Dallas Morning News says that AT&T now faces a legal fight after the phone numbers of over 100 million U.S. customers who used the company’s wireless services between March and October 2022 were stolen in the company’s second major data breach of 2024. The case (3:24-cv-1797) is a class-action lawsuit against the Dallas-based telecommunications giant, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas late Friday by 15-year AT&T customer and named plaintiff Dina Winger. The suit alleges AT&T wasn’t transparent about the severity of the breach, didn’t safeguard important data from malicious parties and earned “unjust enrichment” from customers after failing to protect their information. “As a direct and proximate result of AT&T’s failure to exercise adequate and reasonable care and use commercially adequate and reasonable security measures, the [personally identifiable information] of Plaintiff and Class Members was accessed by ill-intentioned individuals who could and will use the information to commit identity or financial fraud,” the lawsuit reads. “Plaintiff and Class Members face the imminent, certainly impending, and substantially heightened risk of identity theft, fraud, and further misuse of their personal data.”

Patrick Yarborough, a Houston-based lawyer representing Winger who helped file the case, confirmed Monday that this was the first lawsuit filed against AT&T in Dallas for the breach. Should more plaintiffs sue the company, their cases could be lumped into Winger’s class-action lawsuit. Yarborough said he wouldn’t be surprised if dozens more plaintiffs and law firms get involved in the future due to the scope of the data breach. AT&T revealed in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing on Friday that the cause of the breach was a “threat actor” who illegally accessed company workspaces on a third-party cloud platform in April. The actor gradually siphoned nearly six months of call logs dating from May 1 to Oct. 31, 2022, as well as Jan. 2, 2023, compromising the phone numbers of nearly all AT&T customers. AT&T said the breached channel is now closed and the stolen information isn’t publicly available nor personally identifiable (through information like Social Security numbers, names or ages), but phone numbers can still be traced to individuals with easy-to-access online tools like Whitepages. Wired reported Sunday that AT&T paid over $300,000 in Bitcoin to one of the hackers in May to delete the stolen data, which it confirmed with video evidence. The hacker obtained the data by breaking into one of AT&T’s cloud storage accounts hosted by software company Snowflake, Wired reported. Snowflake also serves companies like Ticketmaster, Advance Auto Parts and international banking firm Santander. All of those companies, plus roughly 150 others, were subject to breaches in April and May.

HOUSTON – Bloomberg reports that Furniture retailer Conn’s Inc. is planning to shutter around 100 locations and liquidate the inventory as part of a bankruptcy filing planned for the coming weeks, according to people with knowledge of the matter. The company, based in The Woodlands, has also been huddling with investors in search of financing to help fund its bankruptcy process, according to some of the people, who asked not to be named discussing private information. The store closings would amount to nearly 20% of its footprint and more than 40% of the stores it controls. The company in an April presentation said it had more than 550 locations, though 378 were dealer-owned as part of its franchise model.

HOUSTON – The Houston Chronicle reports that Hurricane Beryl was not the first storm to test the performance of a Texas utility company after paralyzing much of East Texas’ power grid. Entergy, the utility company that serves areas north and east of Houston, became so overwhelmed during its response to a rare ice storm in 1997 that municipal employees handled live wires on their own in the company’s absence. It took the company seven days to restore power to 120,000 customers during a week of freezing temperatures. Not only was Entergy’s emergency response found lacking — much like critics have found CenterPoint’s hurricane response problematic — state regulators discovered that the company had slashed its maintenance spending, enhancing the storm’s natural ability to take down power lines.

“The January 1997 ice storm was certainly a severe storm that would have adversely affected even the best-maintained distribution system,” the state’s Public Utility Commission said in a 1998 order denying Entergy millions in profits it requested. “(Entergy’s) distribution system, however, is not the best-maintained.” The 26-year-old case shows the rare but not unprecedented mechanism that the state’s regulators can use to hold utility companies accountable for failures when they find them. In the wake of Beryl, it could serve as a model for how the PUC might penalize CenterPoint if it is found to have acted negligently. CenterPoint’s profits are guaranteed as part of the regulated monopoly it maintains in Houston, where the utility owns the network of electrical poles and wires carrying power into homes and businesses. Yet regulators have demonstrated they have discretion to reduce those profits when a utility fails to provide adequate maintenance and service to its customers. During an interview Tuesday, former PUC Chairman Pat Wood recalled being inundated with complaints from Southeast Texas after the 1997 storm. The regulatory investigation that followed found “egregious” failures on Entergy’s part.

DALLAS – The Dallas Morning News reports that Texas is the second to worst state in the country to be a woman with health issues, according to new findings from the Commonwealth Fund, a research foundation dedicated to improving health care. In the race to the bottom, the Lone Star state is behind only Mississippi, according to recently released scorecards by the foundation. Mississippi has the highest infant mortality rate in the country. The Commonwealth Fund has been ranking states’ health care coverage since 2006. Since 2020, Texas’s overall ranking on the Commonwealth Fund’s state-by-state scorecard has steadily declined. Last year was the first time the foundation began including women’s health care in its analysis. This year, the foundation went further, producing scorecards specifically ranking women’s health care by state.

“One thing is absolutely clear: Women’s health in the U.S. is in a very fragile state,” said Joseph Betancourt, president of the Commonwealth Fund. Texas ranked last for health care coverage, access and affordability for women in the U.S. The Commonwealth Fund’s focus on women’s health per state arose after the landmark Supreme Court ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization in June 2022, which left the right to abortion up to individual states. “There are stark disparities in women’s access to quality health care amongst states across racial, ethnic and socioeconomic lines,” Betancourt said. “These inequities are long-standing, no doubt, but recent policy choices and judicial decisions restricting access to reproductive care have and may continue to exacerbate this.” Since last year, Texas has moved down a ranking for women’s health, moving to the penultimate slot after New Mexico jumped from last to 41st. Since the Dobbs ruling, women have begun flocking to New Mexico for safe and legal abortion care because the state’s abortion laws are considered among the most permissive in the country.