Investors a Terrible Steward of Health Care

October 3, 2024

US Senate votes unanimously to hold hospital CEO in criminal contempt
The Guardian
Sep 25, 2024
By Maya Yang

 The Senate voted to hold Ralph de la Torre, the CEO of Massachusetts-based, for-profit Steward Health Care, which declared bankruptcy earlier this year, in contempt of Congress after he ignored a congressional subpoena and failed to appear at a hearing over the hospital chain’s alleged abuse of finances. 

Bernie Sanders, Vermont senator and chair of the Senate’s health, education, labor and pensions (Help) committee, said: “The passage of this resolution by the full Senate will make clear that even though Dr de la Torre may be worth hundreds of millions of dollars, even though he may be able to buy fancy yachts and private jets and luxurious accommodations throughout the world, even though he may be able to afford some of the most expensive lawyers in America, no, Dr de la Torre is not above the law.”

De la Torre was paid at least $250m by Steward Health Care as the hospital chain’s administrators struggled with facility problems, staffing shortages and closures. More than a dozen Steward Health Care patients died in recent years after being unable to receive adequate treatment while Dr de la Torre embarked on various jet travels and private yacht excursions.

Senator Ed Markey said, “Steward, led by its founder and CEO Dr Ralph de la Torre and his corporate enablers, looted hospitals across the country for their own profit, and while they got rich, workers, patients and communities suffered, nurses paid out of pocket for cardboard bereavement boxes for the babies to help grieving parents who had just lost a newborn. Dr de la Torre is revealing himself for what he truly is – a physician who places personal gain over his duty to do no harm.”

 

Comment by: Don McCanne

Health Justice Monitor recently presented a brief summary of the Commonwealth Fund’s annual report once again demonstrating that, of the wealthy nations studied, the United States has the most expensive yet poorest performing health care system

Most Americans tend to think that we have the greatest nation on earth, so what would account for the fact that our health care system performs so poorly? One basic fact is well understood. Though other higher performing nations insist that public policies are designed to assure that everyone is included in their systems, we do not. If we demanded that our elected legislators establish such policies, it would get done, or we wouldn’t elect them. As long as we insist on universal coverage, we could also insist on other public policies such as ensuring adequate capacity in the system and controlling wasteful costs, especially superfluous administrative expenditures and excessive profits of private insurance intermediaries.

A particularly onerous feature of our system is that we we allow private investors, the medical industrial complex, to assume ownership of large slices of provider capacity, enabling our health care dollars to bypass patients as they are diverted to investors. Today’s example shows how private equity can move in and buy up control of health care delivery, even physicians themselves through purchase of medical groups, convert much of the system to cash equivalents, and then disburse that value to the private investors … leaving the delivery system without adequate cash reserves and subject to bankruptcy. Result? We have the most expensive system with the poorest performance among wealthy nations.

How could we fix this system? First we need to remove private equity and other profit-seeking non-clinical investors from controlling and diverting our health care dollars. Then we need to set up a public healthcare financing system that is designed to direct funds to where they are clinically needed to ensure that everyone has affordable access to the medical care that they need. This would best be done by creating a public single payer system in the form of a carefully refined version of our current public Medicare system that is expanded to include everyone and cover everything. We also need improved public oversight and support for our dedicated clinical professionals who care primarily about the fate of patients and would be satisfied with a reasonable level of compensation for their services; that is, placing patients above profits.

That is not to say that Dr Ralph de la Torre has not provided us with an important service. He has shown us beyond any doubt why we need to dump our current grossly inadequate and inhumane health care system and replace it with a benevolent public system that will ensure high quality health care for everyone – single payer Medicare for All.