Buried deep in the thousands of pages of one court case, a single line of a few simple words lays bare one what can happen when bad actors apparently run amok in the American health system.
"These insiders," the line reads, "pilfered Steward's assets for their own material gain, while leaving the Company and its hospitals perpetually undercapitalized and insolvent."
Steward, in this case, is Steward Health Care LLC, the Texas-based hospital operator that ran hospitals around the country before collapsing into bankruptcy last year and being forced to sell off assets. One of the company's hospitals was Glenwood Regional Medical Center in West Monroe, a major health care provider in Louisiana's largely rural northeastern corner.
The "insiders" in the line refers to the company's former CEO, Ralph de la Torre, and a handful of other former Steward executives and board members. Earlier this month, Steward filed suit against those former leaders in an attempt to recoup some of what they paid.
According to the filing, "through their greed and bad faith misconduct, (they) operated Steward with the aim of enriching themselves."
The most galling allegation is that de la Torre and others arranged for a $111 million dividend payout to executives and board members in January 2021, "at a time when the SHC System was already insolvent."
In other words, even as their hospitals were failing, the company's executives and board members were paying out tens of millions of dollars themselves. De la Torre, the suit alleges, got $81.5 million in the deal, money he turned around and used to purchase a $30 million yacht.
The suit also alleges de la Torre overpaid — by $200 million — for five hospitals in Miami because he wanted an "empire" there. It also accuses him of directing payments for Steward assets into a company owned by himself and two other executives, again gaining millions while his hospitals failed.
Even in dry legalese, the filing is infuriating.
While de la Torre was enjoying his very first-world yacht, patients in West Monroe were getting "third world medicine," according to what one doctor told a federal inspector.
The problems at Glenwood ranged from the annoying to the critical. Sometimes, medical staff couldn't perform basic diagnostic tests, such as for COVID, strep and staph. Some vendors hadn't been paid.
In one case, a patient complained of chest pain and a doctor recommended emergency surgery. But Glenwood didn't have the personnel to operate and a transfer would have been unsafe. At least one doctor regularly sent patients out of state because of the staffing problems.
The problems got so bad that state inspectors twice put the hospital on a restricted status after it determined that patients' health and safety were in "immediate jeopardy" due to supply and staffing shortages.
The second time, in early 2024, meant the hospital was allowed to operate at only about one-third of its capacity.
Faimon Roberts
STAFF PHOTO BY CHRIS GRANGERMeanwhile, de la Torre may as well have been in the Bahamas, on his yacht, dreaming up the next big dividend payment or plotting the next expansion of his empire. Or maybe he was putting his money in a Cayman Islands bank. Or perhaps checking out islands with no extradition arrangements. I can't say.
I am pretty sure, however, that what he was not doing was worrying about whether people in West Monroe could get a COVID test or a potentially lifesaving heart operation. At a Steward facility in Massachusetts, a woman died one day after giving birth when doctors learned during surgery that supplies needed to treat her had been repossessed, according to a report in The Boston Globe.
That makes De la Torre an avatar for everything that is wrong about the American health care system. For him, profits and personal wealth were more important than his patients in Massachusetts, Texas and northeast Louisiana.
Luckily for those in West Monroe, Glenwood, like the other hospitals Steward owned, has been sold as part of the bankruptcy. Its new owner, California-based Healthcare Systems of America, took over last year. On its website, HSA says its mission is to "breathe new life into struggling hospitals."
That imagery can't be a mistake. A company whose business is literally about breathing new life into human beings wants to do the same for struggling health care facilities.
Glenwood CEO and Chief Medical Officer Mark Boersma, a physician and longtime Glenwood employee, has said that's what HSA is doing. During a tour with Monroe TV news station KNOE, he showed off stuffed supply boxes and insisted that shortages were not a problem. An industry group gave Glenwood an "A" for safety in the fourth quarter of last year, a first, Boersma said.
"Their emphasis was you will run the hospital locally. And we will assist you in any way that we can," he told KNOE.
HSA has been welcomed in West Monroe for obvious reasons. And hopefully Glenwood continues its rebound.
But just in case, let's keep an eye on yacht purchases.
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