Witnesses spoke before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) about the impact Steward Healthcare’s greed and mismanagement have had on patients and health care workers. Hearing On Thursday.
Nurse Ellen McInnis, a former steward nurse at St. Elizabeth Medical Center in Boston, said she attended hundreds of personnel and labor-management meetings over the past 12 years and detailed “unsafe” and “untenable” conditions.
As a director of the Massachusetts Nurses Association, “we represent hundreds of nurses who find it difficult to even come to work, to even take one step forward,” she said. “That’s not OK.”
“I am exhausted by the way they have intentionally, almost maliciously, deprived me of my colleagues, my support system, my supplies and my equipment,” McInnis added.
The committee’s chairman, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), said studies have shown that when private equity firms buy hospitals and health care facilities, prices rise, quality falls and workers are forced to do more with less.
Sanders called Dr. Ralph de la Torre, CEO of Dallas-based Steward Healthcare, “the epitome of this outrageous type of corporate greed.”
In November 2010, global private equity firm Cerberus Capital Management, through its newly formed Steward Healthcare, acquired six Massachusetts hospitals for $895 million. By 2017, the company had acquired 37 hospitals in 10 states, according to the company. Private Equity Stakeholder ProjectA non-profit watchdog group.
Sanders said Delatore had saddled the hospital with billions of dollars of debt, sold the hospital’s land to real estate investment group Medical Properties Trust and charged “unsustainably high rents.”
Since 2018, Steward has closed six hospitals, laid off at least 2,650 employees and cut critical services across hospitals, including obstetrics, behavioral medicine and oncology.
In May, Steward Health Care filed for bankruptcy and announced plans to sell more than 30 hospitals.
Meanwhile, de la Torre has spent $160 million on a yacht, two private jets, a luxury fishing boat and donations to elite prep schools.
De la Torre was summoned to testify at a committee hearing in July. He said last week: He did not attend.
Staffing shortages negatively impact patients and put a strain on nurses
Sanders said a lack of medical equipment and staff at Steward Hospital led to the deaths of an estimated 15 patients and put thousands more at risk.
McInnis, who has worked in Boston hospitals for more than 26 years, recalled how Steward Hospital was severely understaffed and undersupplied, causing patients to suffer “horrific suffering.”
At a hospital in Brockton, Massachusetts, an 81-year-old man with pancreatic cancer died while waiting for treatment in an understaffed emergency department, and at another hospital, a 28-year-old patient “fell into distress” and died during an acute psychological crisis. 39-year-old woman She died of hemorrhagic shock after a normal birth. Her life may have been saved by the use of an embolization coil used to stop the severe bleeding, but the coil had been recalled by the distributor several weeks earlier.
Audra Sprague, a former nurse at Nashoba Valley Medical Center in Lunenburg, Massachusetts, brought her 18-year-old son to the hospital with diabetic ketoacidosis. He had been newly diagnosed with type 1 diabetes and was admitted to the intensive care unit. Due to a staffing shortage, he spent the night in the emergency department with 18 other patients and two nurses.
No matter how hard or fast they worked, two nurses couldn’t care for 18 patients, Sprague said. The hospital’s local leadership had asked for a third nurse for the night shift, but corporate negotiators repeatedly rejected the request. So “I had to be the nurse that night, not his mother,” Sprague said.
McInnis added that other challenges remained. Only one of his building’s six elevators was working. Nurses were given sleds to pull immobile patients in the event of a fire. “I’m 65 years old. Do you think I could drag a patient down the stairs in a sled for a minute?” he said.
McInnis noted that Massachusetts does not have a nursing shortage, just a shortage of nurses willing to work in dangerous environments.
Lack of transparency
Stacey Albritton Mitchell, mayor of West Monroe, Louisiana, described the dire situation state officials found themselves in after an inspection of her city’s Glenwood Regional Medical Center.
Despite serving on the hospital’s board, Mitchell was not informed of Glenwood’s financial problems: “We were always told Glenwood was making a profit,” she said.
Rumors surfaced in the summer of 2023 that local vendors were not being paid, but it wasn’t until the fall that the seriousness of the situation was realised. “And then all of a sudden we were in a crisis straight away,” Mitchell said.
in Written testimony“Private equity and these facilities are getting away with this scheme because it puts these facilities at risk. They’re going to shut them down and [and then] “Your community has nothing. So they suffer even more.”
They then ask politicians for “bailout funds,” which he argued is a crime in itself.
He called on the commission to hold de la Torre accountable: “Put him in jail. He deserves to be in jail for stealing this money from our entire community.”
He also said real estate investment group Medical Properties Trust should be held accountable, saying it ran a “Ponzi-like” scheme, funneling billions of dollars through private equity and turning the health system into a “criminal enterprise.”
Unless steps are taken to stop these groups from funding “other bad actors,” someone else will likely take Steward’s place, Echols said, and he called for new federal laws and increased oversight to restore balance to the industry.
Steward announced in August that it had entered into a “definitive agreement” to sell its Stewardship Health business, which employs about 5,000 physicians and treats about 400,000 patients in Massachusetts and nine other states, to Rural Healthcare Group, an affiliate of private equity firm Kinderhook Industries LLC.
The HELP Committee: Discuss the contempt resolution against de la Torre September 19th.
