CEO, For Profit Steward Health Care Defies Subpoena, Nurses Testify, Horrors of Private Equity Hospital [View all]

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'As Steward CEO Defies Subpoena, Nurses Testify to Horrors of Private Equity Hospitals.'
The "courage" of healthcare workers, said Sen. Ed Markey, was "matched only by Dr. de la Torre's cowardice." Common Dreams, 9.12.24.
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The obscenely rich CEO of Steward Health Care, a for-profit network formed with private equity backing, violated a subpoena on Thursday by declining to testify at a Senate hearing on how mismanagement of the now-bankrupt hospital system harmed patient care.

But in Ralph de la Torre's absence, members of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee did hear from nurses who witnessed firsthand how Steward's prioritization of shareholder payouts and lavish executive compensation left its hospitals in dire straights, with badly insufficient staffing and resources. Ellen MacInnis, a longtime nurse at St. Elizabeth's Medical Center in Boston, said in response to a question from Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) that hospital conditions are "noticeably different" under private equity ownership.

"After Steward took over," said MacInnis, the hospital began "violating agreements" it made with nurses and "laid off all the nursing assistants on our maternity floors." When Murphy said that "the purpose" of hospitals under Steward's ownership was apparently to "make the owners filthy rich," MacInnis responded, "Yes, absolutely." Earlier in her testimony, MacInnis offered what she described as an "egregious and appalling example" of the incompetence and cruelty of Steward's management:

"The failure of Steward to ensure a supply of bereavement boxes, which are the cases used to carry the remains of deceased newborns to the morgue."

"Instead, staff were expected to transport these remains in banker's and shipping boxes," said MacInnis. "To compensate for this indignity it was left to our own nurses to go online and purchase appropriate containers on Amazon." The "most tragic example," MacInnis said, was the death of a 39-year-old mother "simply because the embolism coil that would have saved her life had been repossessed by another unpaid vender."...Read More

Watch the full hearing:

- Sen. Bernie Sanders leads Senate HELP Committe hearing on Impacts of Steward Health Care Bankruptcy. Sept.12, 2024.

READ MORE:
https://www.commondreams.org/news/steward-health-care-private-equity

- As The American Prospect's Maureen Tkacik noted last week, Steward "entered bankruptcy with $8 billion in debt while its CEO siphoned out more than a quarter-billion dollars and blew most of it on an epic midlife crisis, featuring a new wife 29 years his junior, a 500-acre ranch for her prizewinning racehorses, a $77,000-a-month detail for her security while traveling between the couple’s far-flung mansions, an Amalfi Coast wedding choreographed by Gwen Stefani and Blake Shelton’s wedding planner, and not one but two yachts."

Just ahead of Thursday's hearing, The Wall Street Journal reported that Steward paid out $790 million in dividends to shareholders years before filing for bankruptcy...