Kind of a rambling story here. What is going on? Investors are stripping the companies of their resources leaving bare bones so to speak. If you attempt to hold the prime investor responsible, the judges get in the way the same as we see SCOTUS Chief John Roberts becoming more involved and District Judge Cannon doing so under advisement of Justice Thomas. A report on the taking over of a chain of hospitals by private investors. The antagonist being private investor Ralph who does not even show for a Senate hearing. He believes they can not touch him. Two posts back I talked about a state senator who tells a police officer she is exempt from a ticket. Then there is former president Trump, who claims similar, It appears Trump has Chief Justice John
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Kind of a rambling story here. What is going on? Investors are stripping the companies of their resources leaving bare bones so to speak. If you attempt to hold the prime investor responsible, the judges get in the way the same as we see SCOTUS Chief John Roberts becoming more involved and District Judge Cannon doing so under advisement of Justice Thomas.
A report on the taking over of a chain of hospitals by private investors. The antagonist being private investor Ralph who does not even show for a Senate hearing. He believes they can not touch him. Two posts back I talked about a state senator who tells a police officer she is exempt from a ticket. Then there is former president Trump, who claims similar, It appears Trump has Chief Justice John Roberts on his side. It might be so as Trump has yet to face the responsibility for the January 6 insurrection and other things of which he played a part.
Bipartisan Hearing as Led by Bernie Sanders.
Prepared Remarks: Sanders Leads Bipartisan Hearing on Steward Health, CEO Ralph de la Torre, & Private Equity Influence in American Health Care, Senator Bernie Sanders US Senate
Chairman of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP), today led the committee in a hearing titled “Examining the Bankruptcy of Steward Health Care: How Management Decisions Have Impacted Patient Care.”
Ahead of the hearing, the committee authorized a subpoena in a bipartisan vote to compel Steward CEO Dr. Ralph de la Torre to appear today as a witness and provide testimony. This was the first subpoena issued by the HELP Committee since 1981.
Despite the subpoena, Dr. de la Torre failed to appear today for the hearing.
The issues are in the following partial of the report by American Prospect. What we are experiencing with a state senator, Donald Trump, and Ralph de la Torre is a sense of privilege. They believe they are not responsible to anyone or thing. And the courts cold correct this, except the SCOTUS Chief Justice is right in the midst of it.
‘Steward Health Are Health Care Terrorists’
The American Prospect
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 The Boston Globe 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?
Of course, Ralph did not show. Trump didn’t submit either and now we know why. SCOTUS protects him. An X AZ State Senator tried to evade a ticket for speeding. Did not work as the state senate adjourned for the rest of the year. Ralph is just another privileged person like Trump who does not believe he is responsible. The XSenator? Just bad timing.
Back to the story about the Steward Hospital Chain . . . The hearing to establish the issues with Steward 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 what the witnesses would have done with the $800 million dividend Cerberus siphoned out of the hospital in 2016, or the $40 million de la Torre spent on the larger of his two yachts.
Ellen MacInnis, a 26-year veteran of St. Elizabeth’s hospital in Brighton, suggested she might start by paying off the elevator mechanic.
“I work on the 10th floor and there are supposed to be six elevators and one is working, and even that one [only] works most of the time,” said MacInnis. Steward administrators devised a bizarre if creative solution: “They gave us these sleds, to drag patients who can’t walk in an emergency, or if there’s a fire in the building,” she said. “I’m 65 years old. Do you think for one minute I can haul a patient down a flight of stairs in a sled? This is lunacy!”
Staci Albritton Mitchell, the mayor of West Monroe, Louisiana and its hospital, perhaps thinking of the hurricane flooding much of her state at the moment, imagined a new roof for the crumbling Glenwood Regional Medical Center, which a recent inspection had found completely lacking no fewer than 48 basic medical supplies. “If you walk around the hospital, there’ll be buckets in the hallway catching water because of the leaks,” she told the senators. “You had to walk around things like that.”
Ellen MacInnis said she and her colleagues had frequently reached into their own pockets to buy smaller items patients needed: baby formula, Pedialyte, and even dinner. At one point earlier this year, a representative from Boar’s Head reportedly walked into St. Elizabeth’s to repossess its remaining inventory of deli meat. Ellen MacInnis choked back tears recounting how pediatric nurses had pooled funds to buy specialized boxes for presenting the corpses of dead newborns to grieving parents when Steward went on credit hold with the vendor; Steward expected them to simply place the remains in “cardboard shipping boxes.”
“We need to keep this from happening again,” said Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA).
“We have got to make sure that what happened at Steward never happens again,” Markey agreed.
“I’m so grateful that finally somebody’s going to raise the flag and say uncle, we can’t take this anymore, we need to reel in this corporate greed and pass the legislation that will prevent this from happening again,” Ellen MacInnis said later at a post-hearing press conference.
It is all good feelings; but the big-time investor is not there by choice. He can do such and ignore the Senate because of who he is. Is there a judge which will jail him? Is there a judge which will hold Trump responsible.
“U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump nominee, said in her 93-page decision that Smith’s appointment was ‘unlawful’ and unconditional. ‘The clerk is directed to close this case.'” Cannon as advised by Justice Thomas. I digress here a bit.
AND YET, AS STATE REP. MIKE ECHOLS, a Republican health care executive from Louisiana who described Steward’s leadership as “health care terrorists” during the hearing and successfully lobbied Cassidy’s staff to subpoena de la Torre, pointed out in his testimony. Mike ECHOLS
What happened previously is already happening again, to the same hospitals. The private equity–friendly Houston bankruptcy judges overseeing the Steward reorganization just orchestrated a secret deal that handed Glenwood and 18 other Steward hospitals over to their landlord Medical Properties Trust, the real estate investment trust on the other side of the dubious “sale-leaseback” transactions that enabled Cerberus and de la Torre to extract billions from their struggling hospitals.
Sale-leasebacks have brought about the demise of all manner of private equity–owned entities, from Red Lobster and Big Lots to the nursing home chain HCR ManorCare. But Steward’s sale-leaseback was especially catastrophic, because they valued the real estate portfolio at a ludicrous premium. By way of example, MPT valued seven recently closed Steward hospitals at roughly three quarters of a billion dollars in its 2023 financial statements.
From the very outset of their relationship, Steward was unable to pay the rent that resulted from those inflated transactions. They relied on cash advances and injections from MPT to make its payments This in turn caused the hospital chain’s outstanding balance with the REIT to expand to the point that it “owed” MPT more than $8 billion by the time it filed for bankruptcy protection.
In theory, the purpose of bankruptcy protection is to enable a debtor to discharge unsustainable debt, but lease obligations work a bit differently. A bankruptcy judge can force a landlord to reduce the rent on a debtor entity if he or she determines that a sale-leaseback was actually a “disguised financing”—which both Steward and its committee of unsecured creditors argued was self-evidently true of the hospital chain’s absurd rent bill. But MPT, itself in shaky financial condition, was determined to avoid writing down its portfolio, while Steward was hell-bent on avoiding any of the damaging disclosures that a prolonged dispute with MPT would invariably entail.
Does any of this make sense as to how many of the issues are emerging. They go from one issue to another. The issues are never resolved and the person most responsible never answers for the issues. And there is a common link between them all.
PREPARED REMARKS: Sanders Leads Bipartisan Hearing on Steward Health, CEO Ralph de la Torre, & Private Equity Influence in American Health Care » Senator Bernie Sanders, Senate
‘Steward Health Are Health Care Terrorists’ – The American Prospect