Five minutes before last Thursday’s Senate hearing on the Steward hospital chain bankruptcy was scheduled to start, there were still whispers in the room that founder/CEO Ralph de la Torre, who mortgaged the assets of more than three dozen community hospitals across the nation to finance a vast portfolio of luxury real estate and billionaire toys, might actually show up to serve his subpoena. “He’s such a narcissist, there’s a 5 percent chance he walks through the door,” a hospital veteran remarked to me a few days earlier, and he had a point; this is the man who famously bragged to back in 2010 that his own father had once playfully nicknamed him “King of the Cannibals.” Alas, de la Torre did not show.
A flyer circulating around the room featuring a photo of him wearing a floppy red Carmen Sandiego hat humorously speculated as to his whereabouts: “Is he ...
in his villa in Madrid? On his yacht? On his other yacht? And so the hearing consisted of four witnesses: two Massachusetts-based Steward nurses and two politicians representing West Monroe, Louisiana, where Steward gutted a regional hospital serving 26 rural feeder facilities. The witnesses described the deterioration in services and working conditions that accompanied their hospitals’ acquisition by de la Torre and his private equity backers at Cerberus Capital Management, and the subsequent rounds of nine-figure dividend payments the owners made to themselves. At one point, Sen.
Ed Markey (D-MA) asked.