Steward Well being CEO Ralph de la Torre refuses Senate subpoena
The CEO of Steward Well being Care informed senators Wednesday that regardless of a subpoena he wouldn’t seem earlier than a bipartisan Senate committee subsequent week to reply questions in regards to the monetary dealings of his bankrupt hospital chain.
In a bipartisan vote in July, a Senate committee on well being, schooling, labor and pensions approved the subpoena mandating de la Torre to be current on Sept. 12 for testimony in Washington, D.C.
By way of an legal professional, de la Torre requested that the listening to be rescheduled till after Steward’s chapter proceedings are accomplished. In a letter, de la Torre’s legal professional mentioned the listening to can be “a pseudo-criminal continuing during which they use the time, to not collect info, however to convict Dr. de la Torre within the eyes of public opinion.”
The hospital chain filed for chapter in Might and introduced it deliberate to shut two hospitals in Massachusetts and promote different services. Greater than 2,200 workers now count on to be laid off in Massachusetts and Ohio, in response to notices filed with state regulators.
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Bernie Sanders, I-Vermont, who chairs the Senate Well being Training Labor and Pensions Committee mentioned he was “upset, however not shocked” by de la Torre’s request to postpone the listening to however vowed to “transfer ahead aggressively to compel Dr. de la Torre to testify to the gross mismanagement of Steward Well being Care.”
Sanders mentioned he would seek the advice of with different committee members to “decide the very best path ahead.”
“However let me be clear: We is not going to settle for this postponement. Congress will maintain Dr. de la Torre accountable for his greed and for the injury he has prompted to hospitals and sufferers all through America,” Sanders mentioned.
Steward Well being Care was fashioned in 2010 when the personal fairness agency Cerberus Capital Administration acquired a struggling nonprofit hospital chain from the Archdiocese of Boston. De la Torre, a Harvard Medical school member who beforehand led the cardiac surgical procedure unit at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Heart in Boston, grew to become CEO of the brand new entity, named Steward Well being Care.
The Dallas-based firm aggressively expanded to a sequence of greater than 30 hospitals using greater than 30,000 folks. Steward bought the land beneath its hospitals to a company landlord, Medical Properties Belief. The sale-leaseback deal left the hospitals with hefty lease funds in a transfer scrutinized by state lawmakers from Massachusetts to Louisiana.
Senators Edward J. Markey and Elizabeth Warren, each Massachusetts Democrats, blasted de la Torre’s plans to skip the Sept. 12 listening to and search a postponement.
“Dr. de la Torre’s defiance of a subpoena to look earlier than the Senate is outrageous,” Markey and Warren mentioned in a joint assertion. “He bought wealthy as personal fairness and actual property vultures picked aside, and drove into chapter 11, hospitals that employed hundreds of well being care employees who served communities in Massachusetts and throughout the nation.”
