A U.S. Senate committee recommended Thursday that Steward Health Care CEO Dr. Ralph de la Torre be held in contempt of Congress over his refusal to appear before them to discuss the inner workings of the bankrupt hospital chain.
On a pair of 20-0 votes, the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee approved resolutions laying out both civil and criminal contempt charges against de la Torre. The votes move the matter to the full Senate for consideration.
Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, the committee’s chair, said de la Torre is not above the law.
“If you defy a congressional subpoena, you will be held accountable no matter who you are or how well-connected you may be,” Sanders said. “Why did we want Dr. de la Torre to testify before this committee? We wanted to know how it could happen that at least 15 patients at hospitals owned by his company died as a result of a lack of medical equipment or staffing shortages, and that at least 2,000 other patients were put at serious risk, according to federal regulators.”
One resolution would instruct the Senate legal counsel to file a civil suit to require de la Torre to comply with the subpoena and testify before the panel. The other would send the issue to the U.S. district attorney for Washington, D.C., for criminal prosecution.
The committee for months has been seeking de la Torre’s testimony, which Sen. Ed Markey and other Massachusetts lawmakers have described as a way to find answers for the chaos created by Steward’s financial crisis. Two Steward hospitals in the state, Dorchester’s Carney Hospital and Nashoba Valley Medical Center in Ayer, have now closed, and new owners are set to take over the remaining facilities here.
After de la Torre did not appear at an April hearing in Boston, the HELP Committee in July issued a subpoena to compel his testimony on Sept. 12. De la Torre once again declined to testify.
De la Torre had asked to postpone the September hearing, with his lawyer telling senators that a court order prohibits the CEO from speaking on Steward’s behalf about the ongoing bankruptcy proceedings.
His attorney, Alexander Merton of the D.C. firm Quinn Emanuel, wrote to Sanders on Wednesday to inform the committee that de la Torre “invokes his procedural and substantive rights under the Fifth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, including the privilege to refrain from testifying at the Committee’s Hearing.”
“The U.S. Constitution affords Dr. de la Torre inalienable rights against being compelled by the government to provide sworn testimony that is specifically (yet baselessly) sought to frame Dr. de la Torre as a criminal scapegoat for the systemic failures in Massachusetts’ health care system,” Merton wrote.
Merton’s letter described last week’s hearing as an attempt to “ambush Dr. de la Torre in a pseudo-criminal proceeding” and an event “with the goal of convicting Dr. de la Torre in a court of public opinion.”
Nurses from Massachusetts and officials from Louisiana, where Steward also operates hospitals, did testify during the proceedings. Sanders described their comments as “heartbreaking.”
Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, the ranking Republican on the HELP Committee, said the testimony from nurses at St. Elizabeth’s Medical Center in Brighton, about unpaid vendors and a lack of critical supplies, was “so poignant.”
“When a newborn baby dies, normally the nurse would place the child into a bereavement box,” Cassidy said. “They did not buy bereavement boxes, and the nurses had to put these newborns into cardboard shipping boxes.”
