Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com:

Brown University’s plan to join with for-profit Prospect Medical Holdings to buy Care New England to fend off Partners HealthCare’s bid for CNE is motivated by a very reasonable fear. Partners is joined at the hip with the Harvard Medical School. Letting the Partners behemoth into Rhode Island would result in  many patients and clinicians who might otherwise stay in Rhode Island going to Partners’ famous Harvard-affiliated hospitals in Greater Boston, perhaps ravaging the small Brown Medical School in the process.

Indeed, Partners would suck a lot of oxygen out of the Ocean State’s health-care sector. But the takeover looks full-steam ahead. Partners’ Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham and Women’s Hospital may well already be planning to welcome many new patients from Little Rhody.