Senate approves criminal contempt resolution against Steward Health Care CEO

The U.S. Senate approved a resolution Wednesday intended to hold Steward Health Care CEO Ralph de la Torre in criminal contempt for failing to testify before a Senate panel.

The senate approved the measure by unanimous consent.

Members of a Senate committee looking into the bankruptcy of Steward Health Care adopted the resolution last week after de la Torre refused to attend a committee hearing last week despite being issued a subpoena. The resolution was sent to the full Senate for consideration.

Sen. Bernie Sanders, a Vermont independent and chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, said de la Torre’s decision to defy the subpoena gave the committee little choice but to seek contempt charges.

The criminal contempt resolution refers the matter to the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia to criminally prosecute de la Torre for failing to comply with the subpoena.

De la Torre's attorneys previously said testifying before Congress would violate de la Torre's Fifth Amendment rights against self incrimination and interfere with the company's ongoing bankruptcy proceedings. A spokesperson for de la Torre echoed those statements following the vote Wednesday,

"Dr. de la Torre will not be intimidated by the Committee’s threat of prosecution merely for asserting his constitutional protections," a de la Torre spokesperson said in an emailed statement. "The U.S. Constitution stands above the government to protect all Americans from precisely the kind of assault on our rights that we are witnessing here."

Sanders said he wanted de la Torre to explain how at least 15 patients at hospitals owned by Steward died as a result of a lack of medical equipment or staffing shortages and why at least 2,000 other patients were put in “immediate peril,” according to federal regulators.

He said the committee also wanted to know how de la Torre and the companies he owned were able to receive at least $250 million in compensation over the past for years while thousands of patients and health care workers suffered and communities were devastated as a result of Steward Health Care’s financial mismanagement.

Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, the ranking Republican on the committee, said communities were harmed because of the actions of Steward and de la Torre.

“Steward’s mismanagement has nationwide implications affecting patient care in more than 30 hospitals across eight states including one in my home state,” he said.

Texas-based Steward, which operates about 30 hospitals nationwide, filed for bankruptcy in May.

Steward has been working to sell five hospitals in Massachusetts. But it received inadequate bids for two other hospitals, Carney Hospital in Boston and Nashoba Valley Medical Center in the town of Ayer, both of which have closed as a result.

A federal bankruptcy court this month approved the sale of Steward’s other Massachusetts hospitals.

Steward has also shut down pediatric wards in Massachusetts and Louisiana, closed neonatal units in Florida and Texas, and eliminated maternity services at a hospital in Florida.

Sen. Edward Markey of Massachusetts said over the past decade, Steward, led by de la Torre, and its corporate enablers, “looted hospitals across the country for profit, and got rich through their greedy schemes.”

“Hospital systems collapsed, workers struggled to provide care, and patients suffered and died. Dr. de la Torre and his corporate cronies abdicated their responsibility to these communities that they had promised to serve,” he added.

Ellen MacInnis, a nurse at St. Elizabeth’s Medical Center in Boston, testified before the committee last week that under Steward management, patients were subjected to preventable harm and even death, particularly in understaffed emergency departments.

She said there was a time when Steward failed to pay a vendor who supplied bereavement boxes for the remains of newborn babies who had died and had to be taken to the morgue.

“Nurses were forced to put babies’ remains in cardboard shipping boxes,” she said. “These nurses put their own money together and went to Amazon and bought the bereavement boxes.”

With reporting from The Associated Press' Steve LeBlanc and WBUR's Deborah Becker.