The Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee will vote next week on holding Ralph de la Torre, the CEO of embattled health care system Steward Health Care, in contempt for failing to comply with a subpoena to testify before the committee Thursday.
Chairman Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and ranking member Bill Cassidy, R-La., made the announcement Thursday after hearing from nurses at Steward Health Care hospitals, who detailed how alleged financial mismanagement led to patient safety issues and even death.
“Witnesses cannot disregard and evade a duly authorized subpoena,” Cassidy said at the hearing.
The committee will vote next week on two resolutions: one would instruct the Senate legal counsel to bring a civil suit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to require de la Torre’s compliance with the subpoena and his testimony before the committee.
A separate criminal contempt resolution would refer the matter to the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia to criminally prosecute de la Torre for not complying with the subpoena.
If approved by the committee, the resolutions would proceed to the Senate for a floor vote.
Until Sept. 4, de la Torre’s attorneys had indicated to the committee he would comply, Cassidy said.
But last week, his attorney said he would not be attending, calling the planned hearing a “pseudo-criminal proceeding.”
Instead, lawmakers heard Thursday from a pair of nurses who worked for the health care system who detailed the harms of chronic understaffing and lack of equipment.
Nurses used their own money to purchase bereavement boxes for dead newborns after Steward failed to pay a vendor, said Ellen MacInnis, a nurse at Steward-owned St. Elizabeth’s Medical Center, in Boston, where she has been an emergency department nurse for 20 years.
She said nurses also used their own money to buy food for patients when the hospital didn’t have any. She told the story of a 39-year-old mother who died after childbirth because the hospital didn’t have a routine piece of equipment that could have saved her life. The equipment had been repossessed by a vendor.
“We always struggled to have enough staff, enough equipment, enough supplies to keep our patients safe,” MacInnis said. “It has led to horrific suffering and harm to our patients and the people who take care of our patients and our communities.”
Steward Health Care declared bankruptcy in May. Since then, it has struggled to find buyers for dozens of facilities across eight states, causing stress in communities about potential closures.
De la Torre allegedly extracted millions of dollars from the system, along with investors Cerberus Capital Management, a private equity firm, and Medical Properties Trust.
Lawmakers and witnesses accused Steward and de la Torre of reducing overhead to funnel money to stakeholders and owners of the hospital at the expense of patients and staff.
Audra Sprague, a former nurse at Nashoba Valley Medical Center in Ayer, Mass., which is owned by Steward Health Care, detailed unpaid vendor payments, resulting in missing supplies, broken beds and refusals to hire more nurses.
When she had to take her son to the intensive care unit for a potentially fatal complication from diabetes, she had to take over his care because of a lack of nurses on duty.
“To ensure that my son received the critical, time-sensitive care he needed, I had to be his nurse that night and not his mother,” she said. “And he deserved to have both.”
Despite pleas from the hospital’s administration to Steward to hire more nurses, especially on the night shift, “they would just say no,” she said.
“Steward Health Care systematically extracted every possible dollar that they could get out of our hospital until it led to its closure 12 days ago,” Sprague said.
West Monroe, La., Mayor Staci Albritton Mitchell, a member of the community advisory board for another Steward Health Care facility Glenwood Regional Medical Center, said the community was left in the dark about Steward’s finances.
A local vendor reached out to her to see if she could do anything about an unpaid $72,000 bill for landscaping.
“We didn’t know. It was always presented that Glenwood was profitable,” she said.
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