Let Them Eat Invoices
Steward grifter Ralph de la Torre, supposedly under criminal investigation on two continents, is now telecommuting from Versailles.
BY MAUREEN TKACIK AUGUST 13, 2024
Debra Russell was working a shift at the Glenwood Regional Medical Center in West Monroe, Louisiana, when a relatively young patient began having a heart attack. When an emergency room physician read his EKG and attempted to call a cardiologist, the cardiologist refused to have the conversation; the hospital hadn’t paid him in months. So the doctor ordered a vial of the emergency anti-clot agent TNKase and asked Russell to administer it immediately, which is when she learned that Cardinal Health had also cut the hospital off for not paying its bills, so there wouldn’t be any TNKase either.
Glenwood’s parent company, Steward Health Care, had spent most of the year failing to pay millions of dollars to supply its Texas and Louisiana hospitals with generalist doctors and nurse practitioners like Russell. In its desperation to keep the clinicians showing up, Steward execs constantly claimed to have sent payments they had not actually sent, at one point even emailing the staffing agency copies of fake checks they claimed to have mailed.
“The last couple of weeks that I was there at Glenwood, I would pray every morning, ‘Lord give me a sign to stay or to get out of this,’” Russell recalled last spring at a hearing of the Louisiana House of Representatives. One morning, she saw the community coffee service man, who had been restocking the cafeteria for 30 years, repossessing all the pots and urns, and she knew it was time. She worked her final shift last November, just a week or two before a team of inspectors from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services composed a report identifying 48 basic critical supplies, from blood to milk to biopsy needles to ICU beds, that the hospital had run out of altogether due to “the current corporate practice of not paying vendors in a timely manner.”
SNIP
Since Russell testified in April, her erstwhile hospital chain Steward has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection; had three of its executives indicted in Malta and an FBI criminal investigation formally opened into its management; been described as an “elaborate Ponzi scheme” by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) in a speech before the successful vote of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee to issue a formal subpoena to the company’s notoriously extravagant founder; and been revealed in a series of articles published by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) to have spent more than $7 million paying private intelligence firms to carry out elaborate “false flag” operations against critics and internal whistleblowers, during the same months Glenwood was going without blood and coffee.
https://prospect.org/health/2024-08-13-let-them-eat-invoices/
= new reply since forum marked as read
