A proposal to move a hospital license from one Monmouth County town to another suddenly erupted into a substantial political fight today, with Rep. Frank Pallone (D-Long Branch) accusing Gov. Phil Murphy’s administration of abandoning his constituents for the sake of corporate greed.
The Murphy administration has pushed back on Pallone’s claims, saying that his characterization of the dispute leaves out critical details.
RWJBarnabas Health, which operates the Monmouth Medical Center in Long Branch, applied to relocate a hospital license away from that facility and into a new facility in Tinton Falls, a wealthier suburb a few towns away. The Long Branch facility would still provide medical care but would cease to feature services like labor and delivery or acute care in-patient beds, which Pallone – a lifelong Long Branch resident whose brother serves as the city’s mayor – argued would make it a “shell” of its current self.
Pallone said today that he’s spent the last ten or so years trying to prevent hospital services from leaving Long Branch, and that he had put forward a plan that would both keep critical hospital services in the city and allow for a new facility to be built in Tinton Falls. Yesterday, however, the Murphy administration officially deemed RWJBarnabas’s application to move the license out of Long Branch as complete, kick-starting the approval process.
“The governor is to blame, the health commissioner is to blame – they could have prevented this,” Pallone said on a press call earlier today. “I think it’s an outrage that they’ve done this and set this process in motion.”
But the Murphy administration pointed out that no decision had actually been made regarding RWJBarnabas’s application, merely that it had been deemed complete. Pallone’s plan to keep both hospitals running would have also run into procedural roadblocks, according to the administration, since RWJBarnabas has only applied for a license relocation, and an entirely separate process would have been needed to allow both the Long Branch and Tinton Falls facilities to operate under the same license.
“Congressman Pallone is entitled to his own views, but not his own facts,” Murphy spokesperson Maggie Garbarino said in a statement. “RWJBarnabas Health has submitted a complete application to the New Jersey Department of Health to relocate a current hospital license to a new facility in the nearby community of Tinton Falls, while ensuring continuity of Emergency Department and certain inpatient and outpatient services in Long Branch. The Department plans to continue its evaluation process over the next few weeks.”
RWJBarnabas did not respond to a request for comment on Pallone’s accusations, but the company (which counts former Murphy chief of staff George Helmy among its leaders) said separately that it remains committed to its Long Branch facility.
“The Long Branch campus will continue to provide essential emergency services, while the new acute care hospital in Tinton Falls, with its close proximity to the Garden State Parkway and other major roadways, will bring Monmouth Medical Center’s nationally recognized clinical care closer to more people we serve across the county and region,” Mary Anne Nagy, the chairperson of the Monmouth Medical Center Board of Trustees, said in a statement.
Pallone and Murphy, both Democrats, have long been political allies; Pallone endorsed Murphy early on in his 2017 campaign for governor, and was one of First Lady Tammy Murphy’s strongest supporters when she ran for U.S. Senate in 2024.
The fact that their feud has spilled out so publicly, then, is noteworthy. Pallone and the Murphy administration both indicated that there had been many rounds of behind-the-scenes talks before today to attempt to resolve the issue, but apparently to no avail.
Now that the application is complete, a public comment process will follow, with hearings in Long Branch and before the State Health Planning Board; the board is ultimately tasked with making a recommendation on the plan to the state commissioner of health. Pallone urged his constituents to show up at those hearings to oppose the plan, and said that Murphy could still come out against the application.
If he doesn’t, Pallone warned, similar moves may start becoming more common: “This process of moving to more affluent areas in order to make a bigger profit, and throwing aside the little guy and the less affluent, will start happening all over the state.”
This story was updated at 3:59 p.m. with comment from RWJBarnabas.
