A correction to an earlier version of this article has been appended to the end of the article.

OAKLAND — Bay Area politicians unveiled a new plan aimed at stopping a wave of hospital closures in California, including Berkeley’s Alta Bates Hospital, slated for closure by 2030, by giving the state Attorney General the authority to review the impact of the decision before allowing it to move forward.

The legislation, authored by state Sen. Nancy Skinner (D-Berkeley), focuses on not-for-profit hospitals, such as Kaiser, Alta Bates and Summit. Under current law, California hospitals are only required to give a 90-day notice to the Department of Public Health prior to shutting down operations. If passed, the hospital would also be required to hold at least one public hearing.

The announcement comes two years after the closure of Doctors Medical Center in San Pablo, which recorded approximately 33,000 visits a year and served Richmond, Hercules, Pinole, San Pablo and surrounding communities. Since the closure, hospital admissions to the Kaiser Richmond Medical Center, the closest hospital, have tripled, according to Kaiser.

“Closing hospitals and emergency rooms worsen health outcomes and increase deaths,” Skinner said Monday at a press conference in Oakland. “There are longer waiting times for services, longer ambulance travel times and overcrowding at facilities.”

California has 6.7 emergency departments per 1 million people, the lowest ratio in the nation, according to the American College of Emergency Care, and lacks adequate numbers of staffed inpatient and psychiatric care beds. Since 1998, 50 California hospitals have closed in the state, according to an investigation by the Los Angeles Times, partly because the need for around the clock staffing makes them expensive to operate.

Hospitals say that with improvements in technology, more patients are now treated on an outpatient basis, requiring fewer beds. Critics counter that closures are largely profit-driven and argue that they put the most vulnerable at risk.

In response to the closure of Doctors Medical Center, which closed after years of financial losses, and the looming closure of the 300-bed Alta Bates, new urgent care facilities have opened or are being built in Richmond, Emeryville, San Pablo and Berkeley. But urgent care facilities do not replace emergency rooms because they can’t treat heart attacks and other cardiac problems, sepsis or significant fractures, said Dr. Desmond Carson, a former head of emergency care at Doctors Medical Center who now works at LifeLong Medical Center in San Pablo, a nonprofit health clinic.

“A clinic cannot take on a gunshot wound, a fractured femur or do surgeries,” Carson said at the news conference. “If you have a heart attack and you don’t get to a place where we can open a vessel, you will lose time. And time is life.”

Hospital closures are politically unpopular, but politicians have had little recourse to challenge them. The hope is with the new legislation, which would require approval from the state, regulators will have more leverage to counter actions taken by hospitals, the politicians said.

“This is a smart and reasonable approach,” said Assemblyman Tony Thurmond, whose district includes Oakland, Berkeley, El Cerrito, Richmond and surrounding cities. “(Plans to close a hospital) should be reviewed and vetted by the Attorney General and should have a community meeting, which Sutter has not had the audacity to have.”

It was not immediately known what kind of support the bill, SB 687, has from other legislators.

Correction: March 6, 2017

An earlier version of this article gave an incorrect year of the planned Alta Bates closure. Sutter Health, the owner of the hospital, has not announced a closure date, but it required by law to either conduct seismic upgrades or close the hospital by 2030.