On Tuesday evening, several hundred people packed into Florian Hall for a public hearing about the now-imminent closure of Carney Hospital.

The meeting, scheduled a week before by officials from the state’s Dept. of Public Health (DPH), should not have happened. The Healey administration should have postponed the hearing the moment that a US bankruptcy judge in Houston postponed a different hearing there that was also originally set for Tuesday but has now been pushed off until Friday.

How are the two related?

At the Texas hearing, the court was expected to reveal details that have been hidden from the public’s view for weeks and even months now regarding its opaque proceedings. Critically, the public would have been afforded some sense of who has stepped forward to acquire the Steward hospitals that are up for sale in an auction process that has played out mainly over the summer months.

It ended, we are told, with legitimate bids for six of the eight Steward-owned facilities in Massachusetts, including Saint Elizabeth’s Medical Center, Saint Anne’s Hospital, Good Samaritan Medical Center, Holy Family Hospital – Haverhill, Holy Family Hospital – Methuen, and Morton Hospital.

At present, the press and the public at-large have no actual understanding of the facts driving the court’s decision-making nor Gov. Healey’s agreement to subsidize any deal to transfer ownership of the select Steward hospitals by putting up at least $30 million in taxpayer dollars to help bridge operations until sales are complete.

As allowed before in this space, the governor is in the difficult position of trying to help orchestrate the orderly transfer of bankrupt hospitals that are all critically important to the communities they serve. The loss of any of these facilities undermines the safety of the public and the collective disruption of the whole group would be catastrophic.

That said, the treatment of our communities – Dorchester and Mattapan, along with the impacted towns in the Nashoba Valley – by Healey and her lieutenants has been a grave disappointment. The governor herself, in one breath, proclaims that she is powerless on the closures.

And yet, in the very next moment, she acknowledges that she and her cabinet appointees have been intimately engaged in negotiating a deal to keep select hospitals open.

Healey’s refusal to explain her motivation for sacrificing Carney and Nashoba is likely rooted in her reluctance to disrupt delicate talks in Houston. Fair enough.

But that should have been cause enough to delay Tuesday’s requisite DPH hearing in Dorchester and another one set for Thursday in Ayer.

The people who work at these hospitals – and the tens of thousands of people who rely on them for their care – should have access to a full understanding of deals that are on the table to sell the six hospitals and who the buyers and previous bidders have been in the process.

We should also have a full understanding of how Carney and Nashoba were cut out of the mix, by whom, and why. Instead, Team Healey has expedited closure hearings without the disclosures that we all need to make informed decisions. That, neighbors, can only be characterized as a massive failure of state government at the highest level.

Bill Forry is the executive editor and publisher of the Dorchester Reporter.