A congressional committee led by Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey plans to subpoena Steward Health Care CEO Ralph de la Torre, after reports of financial mismanagement have led to the hospital chain declaring bankruptcy.
In the course of its bankruptcy proceedings, Steward opened bids on its seven hospitals operating in Massachusetts, including Holy Family Hospital with campuses in Methuen and Haverhill, which were due at the start of this week. As of Wednesday, the state’s top public health official had no information on where those bids stood.
“Perhaps more than anyone else in America, Dr. Ralph de la Torre, the CEO of Steward Health Care, is the poster child for the type of outrageous corporate greed that is permeating through our for-profit health care system,” read a joint statement Thursday from Markey, who chairs the U.S. Senate’s Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Subcommittee on Primary Health and Retirement Security, and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, chair of the HELP Committee.
“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. As a result, Steward Health Care, and the more than 30 hospitals it owns in eight states, were forced to declare bankruptcy with some $9 billion in debt,” Markey and Sanders said.
Many of Steward’s Massachusetts hospitals operate in low-income areas or health care deserts, and both patients and staff have been fleeing to find medical care and work at other facilities as uncertainty swirls around whether the hospitals will remain open.
Citing, “corporate greed at its most disgusting,” Markey and Sanders continued, “While patients and providers at Steward-owned hospitals suffered and his company careened towards bankruptcy, Dr. de La Torre received an estimated $100 million from his private equity enablers that he used to buy a $40 million yacht and a $15 million luxury fishing boat.”
Markey and Sen. Elizabeth Warren held a hearing on the Steward crisis in Boston this spring, and invited de la Torre to testify about financial mismanagement at the company. Markey wrote in the statement that he has been invited to come before Congress several times, but “time and time again, he has arrogantly refused.”
The HELP Committee will vote next week to subpoena de la Torre and conduct an investigation of the financial processes that led to Steward’s bankruptcy.
Sam Drysdale, State House News Service.