WASHINGTON, July 18 – Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee Chairman Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Subcommittee Chair Ed Markey (D-Mass.) on Thursday issued the following statement:

In America today, we have a dysfunctional and cruel health care system that is designed not to make patients well, but to make executives extraordinarily wealthy.

There could not be a clearer example of that than private equity vultures on Wall Street making a fortune by taking over hospitals, stripping their assets, and lining their own pockets.

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 system.

Working with private equity forces, 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.

Several of Steward’s hospitals have been forced to close their doors. Others couldn’t pay their health providers or purchase life-saving hospital supplies. Now, communities across the country are grappling with the possibility of losing their local hospitals as a result of Steward’s gross financial mismanagement. Meanwhile, Dr. de la Torre received an estimated $16 million a year in compensation, and Cerberus, the private equity firm that he partnered with, made an $800 million profit.

Adding insult to injury, while patients and providers at Steward-owned hospitals suffered and his company careened towards bankruptcy, Dr. de La Torre received an estimated $100 million from his private equity enablers that he used to buy a $40 million yacht and a $15 million luxury fishing boat.

That is corporate greed at its most disgusting.

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. 

Next week, the HELP Committee will vote, on a bipartisan basis, to subpoena Dr. de la Torre and to conduct a thorough and comprehensive investigation into the financial schemes that led to Steward’s bankruptcy. It is time for Congress to hold Dr. de la Torre accountable for his greed.