Steward Health CEO Ralph de la Torre refuses Senate subpoena
The CEO of Steward Health Care told senators Wednesday that despite a subpoena he would not appear before a bipartisan Senate committee next week to answer questions about the financial dealings of his bankrupt hospital chain.
In a bipartisan vote in July, a Senate committee on health, education, labor and pensions authorized the subpoena mandating Ralph de la Torre to be present on Sept. 12 for testimony in Washington, D.C.
Through an attorney, de la Torre requested that the hearing be rescheduled until after Steward’s bankruptcy proceedings are completed. In a letter, de la Torre’s attorney said the hearing would be “a pseudo-criminal proceeding in which they use the time, not to gather facts, but to convict Dr. de la Torre in the eyes of public opinion.”
The hospital chain filed for bankruptcy in May and announced it planned to close two hospitals in Massachusetts and sell other facilities. More than 2,200 employees now expect to be laid off in Massachusetts and Ohio, according to notices filed with state regulators.
More:CEO got big bucks as his hospital chain imploded. Here’s who suffered.
Bernie Sanders, I-Vermont, who chairs the Senate Health Education Labor and Pensions Committee said he was “disappointed, but not surprised” by de la Torre’s request to postpone the hearing but vowed to “move forward aggressively to compel Dr. de la Torre to testify to the gross mismanagement of Steward Health Care.”
Sanders said he would consult with other committee members to “determine the best path forward.”
“But let me be clear: We will not accept this postponement. Congress will hold Dr. de la Torre accountable for his greed and for the damage he has caused to hospitals and patients throughout America,” Sanders said.
Steward Health Care was formed in 2010 when the private equity firm Cerberus Capital Management acquired a struggling nonprofit hospital chain from the Archdiocese of Boston. De la Torre, a Harvard Medical faculty member who previously led the cardiac surgery unit at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, became CEO of the new entity, named Steward Health Care.
The Dallas-based company aggressively expanded to a chain of more than 30 hospitals employing more than 30,000 people. Steward sold the land underneath its hospitals to a corporate landlord, Medical Properties Trust. The sale-leaseback deal left the hospitals with hefty rent payments in a move scrutinized by state lawmakers from Massachusetts to Louisiana.
Senators Edward J. Markey and Elizabeth Warren, both Massachusetts Democrats, blasted de la Torre’s plans to skip the Sept. 12 hearing and seek a postponement.
“Dr. de la Torre’s defiance of a subpoena to appear before the Senate is outrageous,” Markey and Warren said in a joint statement. “He got rich as private equity and real estate vultures picked apart, and drove into bankruptcy, hospitals that employed thousands of health care workers who served communities in Massachusetts and across the country.”
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