GOV. MAURA HEALEY called Steward Health Care a “house of cards” and cited as evidence the company’s failure to provide audited financial statements for 2022.
After a meeting on Monday with top legislative leaders at the State House, Healey said the company’s failure to provide audited financial statements beyond 2021 in response to a demand letter from the governor is evidence that the company’s books are in disarray and no auditor will sign off on them.
“What the response to my letter showed is that Steward didn’t produce audited financial statements because Steward doesn’t have audited financials, which speaks to the very thing that we’ve complained about for a long time, which is a house of cards and a charade that has put patients and providers and the stability of our market at risk,” Healey said.
House Speaker Ron Mariano said he wanted to “double-down” on the governor’s comments. “This has been an ongoing fight since 2012 to get Steward to report its financials,” he said. “It’s a semi-regulated industry in Massachusetts, yet they’ve fought at every turn the release of their financials, to the point where they took it to court, lost, and now they’re appealing the decision. So that’s where it is. If anyone is feeling sorry for Steward right now, they’re crazy. Because Steward has practiced a game of hide the numbers, and they’ve been very successful at it. And they continue to do it under the threat of a letter from the governor.”
Mariano said Steward has stiffed nearly all of its vendors at one time or another. “It’s an embarrassment to the system,” he said of the company.
Healey singled out Steward CEO Ralph de la Torre without mentioning him by name. “This is a problem the Commonwealth of Massachusetts did not create,” Healey said. “One individual and one management team at Steward created this mess and it has put a lot of people at risk, caused a lot of understandable concern, and makes a lot of us really, really angry about what transpired,” she said.
The governor also referred to de la Torre a second time,referring to him as “a particular CEO [who] came and chose to do what it appears he did in terms of how he ran operations and put patients and providers and our communities at risk.”
Healey did not elaborate on what specifically de la Torre did, but speculation has centered on the company’s decision to get in bed with a private equity company called Cerberus Capital Management and later sell its hospital properties to a real estate investment trust that then leased them back to Steward.