BOSTON (AP) — A Senate committee voted Thursday to authorize an investigation into the bankruptcy of Steward Health Care and to subpoena the company’s CEO, Dr. Ralph de la Torre. The subpoena would compel de la Torre to testify before the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee at a hearing on Sept.
12. De la Torre had declined a June 25 invitation to testify by committee Chair Sen. Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent, and Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, the committee’s top Republican.
De la Torre also refused invitations to testify at a Boston field hearing chaired by Democratic Sen. Edward Markey of Massachusetts. In May, Steward said it planned to sell off all its hospitals after announcing that it had filed for bankruptcy protection.
Sanders said the Steward bankruptcy shows the dangers of allowing private equity executives to make huge amounts of money by taking over hospitals, loading them up with debt and stripping their assets. “Perhaps more than anyone else in America, a dubious distinction no doubt, Ralph de la Torre, CEO of Steward Health Care, epitomizes the type of outrageous corporate greed that is permeating throughout our for-profit health care system,” Sanders said. Sanders said de la Torre became “obscenely wealthy” by loading up hospitals from Massachusetts to Arizona with billions of dollars in debt and selling the land underneath the hospitals to real estate executives who charged unsustainably high rents.
As a result, Sanders.