Bernie Sanders, Ed Markey will hold vote to subpoena Steward CEO
Published in Health & Fitness
BOSTON — It’s time for the CEO of now-bankrupt Steward Health Care to show up and answer to Congress, according to U.S. Sens. Ed Markey and Bernie Sanders.
The pair of senior Democrats say their committee will hold a “bipartisan” vote next week on whether to subpoena Dr. Ralph de la Torre, who they say has enriched himself at the cost of their constituent’s health.
“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 systems,” the pair of Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee members said in a joint statement on Thursday.
Under de la Torre’s leadership, Steward, which filed for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy protections in May, has sold the ground out from underneath its hospitals, and then tied the facilities to high price leases, and sent the profits from such a scheme back to the company’s executives, according to the pair of senators.
“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,” they said.
When the HELP committee meets next week, the pair say they will call for a vote to summon de la Torre to Congress via subpoena and to start “a thorough and comprehensive investigation” into conduct at Steward, in part because the health care CEO has apparently refused past invitations to voluntarily testify before lawmakers.
“Time and time again we have invited Dr. de la Torre to come before Congress to testify about the financial mismanagement at Steward that led to one of the largest health care bankruptcies in our nation’s history. And time and time again, he has arrogantly refused. Enough is enough. It is time for Dr. de la Torre to get off of his yacht and explain to Congress how much he has gained financially while bankrupting the hospitals he manages,” they said.
Steward’s eight operational Massachusetts hospitals were scheduled to be sold at auction on Thursday. The Attorney General’s office and the Department of Public Health could not provide any information about the auctions, and court filings available as of press time on Thursday did not demonstrate the result of the auctions.
A sale hearing is scheduled in U.S. Bankruptcy Court’s Southern District of Texas on July 31.
A spokesperson for the health care company did not immediately return a request for comment.
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