When it comes to Congress, lawmakers say you can run, but you can’t hide.
The embattled CEO of Steward Health Care’s Friday announcement to step away from his role leading a now-bankrupt hospital chain was met by stern weekend warnings from several Senate lawmakers that, though he might be seeing himself out of a job, he hasn’t slipped under their radars.
U.S. Sen. Ed Markey, the Commonwealth’s junior upper-chamber lawmaker who several times unsuccessfully attempted to meet in person with Steward’s CEO only to be stood up, reacted to de la Torre’s Friday announcement he would be “amicably separated from Steward on mutually agreeable terms” on October 1 by making it clear he is after more than the doctor’s paycheck.
“Ralph de la Torre’s resignation is not enough,” Markey said.
“This resignation comes too late for the workers, patients, and communities that Mr. de Torre harmed and abandoned,” said Senator Markey.
Steward Health Care, which owned and operated half-a-dozen Massachusetts hospital properties before it went bankrupt in May and subsequently sold them off, is working its way through Chapter 11 proceedings while staring down billions in debt obligations.
Despite these debts, according to Markey, de la Torre made an outright fortune while allegedly running his hospital system into the ground, but he’s not going to be allowed to just take that money and run. The CEO must, Markey said, “be held accountable in the court of law.”
“He has extracted hundreds of millions from emergency departments, operating rooms, and intensive care units to buy luxury property, expensive vacations, and yachts, all while patients suffered and died and workers and hospitals went uresourced. As a physician and CEO of Steward, de la Torre knew the cost of his greed and mismanagement, and he allowed it to rot the financial security of an entire hospital system anyway,” he said.
U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, who chairs the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committee on which Markey also sits, said via that social media platform formerly known as Twitter that if the doctor thinks he can just walk away, then he’s got another thing coming.
“If Dr. de la Torre believes that by resigning as CEO of Steward Health Care he can evade responsibility for looting hospitals from Massachusetts to Arizona, he is sorely mistaken. It’s time for him to be held accountable for his outrageous and unacceptable corporate greed,” Sanders wrote.
“Good riddance,” U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren wrote.
“Massachusetts communities are finally free from Ralph’s destructive reign, but he’s not off the hook yet — the authorities still must prosecute his contempt charge and investigate him for other possible crimes he may have committed as Steward’s CEO,” she wrote.
According to his legal counsel, lawmakers in Massachusetts need to mind their own business before they come after the doctor’s.
“While Dr. de la Torre has amicably separated from Steward on mutually agreeable terms, he will continue to be a tireless advocate for the improvement of reimbursement rates for the underprivileged patient population. Dr. de la Torre urges continued focus on this mission and believes Steward’s financial challenges put a much-needed spotlight on Massachusetts’s ongoing failure to fix its healthcare structure and the inequities in its state system,” they said in a statement.
De la Torre’s resignation came just days after the HELP committee voted on a pair of contempt resolutions responding to the doctor’s failure to answer a Congressional subpoena calling for his on-the-record testimony. One resolution direct the Senate Legal Counsel to sue de la Torre in civil court to compel his testimony, the other offers a contempt of Congress referral for his failure to appear in the first place.
De la Torre’s legal council, ahead of his resignation announcement, told the Herald that the HELP committee is trying to trap de la Torre, and that lawmakers have “weaponized Congress’s civil and criminal contempt procedures to punish Dr. de la Torre, and obtain his testimony by compulsion, simply because Dr. de la Torre invoked his Fifth Amendment rights in response to a subpoena from the Committee commanding his testimony in a pseudo-criminal proceeding.”
