CEO Ralph De La Torre calls the Senate hearing a “pseudo-criminal proceeding.” He won’t testify: Ralph de la Torre, CEO of Steward Health Care, will not appear at a bipartisan Senate committee in Washington next week. Bankrupt corporation. In July, de la Torre He ordered to appear in a Senate Health, Education, Labour, and Pensions Committee public hearing next Thursday. On Wednesday, his lawyer, Alexander Merton, wrote to the HELP committee that the senators were “determined to turn the hearing into a pseudo-criminal proceeding in which they are using the time not to gather facts.” But to test Dr. de la Torre publicly.”
Instead, it requests the tribunal postpone the hearing until the trustee’s bankruptcy procedures are complete. Steward declared bankruptcy in May and is selling his five Massachusetts hospitals. On Wednesday afternoon, HELP committee chairman Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont said he was “disappointed but not surprised” that de la Torre would not testify. Sanders stated, “Perhaps more than anyone else in America, Dr. de la Torre is the poster child for the kind of outrageous corporate greed that permeates our for-profit health care system. Working with private scores, he made obscenely wealthy by loading hospitals throughout the nation with billions in debt and selling the ground underneath them to real estate businessmen at unsustainable prices. This affects Steward Health Care and others. He declared bankruptcy for his 30 hospitals in eight states due to $9 billion in debt.
Sanders claimed he is not helping committee members “determine the best way forward.” “But let me be clear: we will not accept this delay. “Congress will hold Dr. de la Torre responsible for his selfishness and the devastation he has brought to hospitals and people throughout America,” Sanders said. “This committee will aggressively demand Dr. De La Torre testify about Steward Health Care’s gross mismanagement. Dr. de la Torre should leave his $40 million boat and tell Americans how. He made a lot of money during his hospitals’ bankruptcy.”
Massachusetts Sens. Ed Markey and Elizabeth Warren called his reluctance to testify “outrageous.” Markey and Warren said Dela Torre’s refusal of the Senate’s summons to appear is reprehensible. He became wealthy when private equity and real estate schemes bankrupted hospitals that employed thousands of health care workers in Massachusetts and beyond. While shamefully and cruelly demolishing the Steward’s hospitals, de la Torre lived in luxury and exploited them as his piggy bank. CBS News First reported. Boston federal prosecutors investigated Steward Health Care for fraud and misconduct in July.
The Senate probe targets de la Torre and Steward’s oversight of hundreds of small hospitals nationwide. De la Torre’s attorney wrote Wednesday that committee members had called for a criminal inquiry of Dr. de la Torre without evidence. “This committee cannot prejudge alleged criminal activity under the Steward’s bankruptcy case, and the fact that its members have already done so smacks of a covert attempt to ignore Dr. de la Torre’s constitutional rights.” It would be improper for Dr. De la Torre to testify under oath on topics of which the Committee has already found him guilty. Merton said his client would not testify this time because “to do otherwise would run afoul of a federal court order barring him from reviewing the aforementioned mediation efforts.”
