# Steward Health Care **Steward Health Care** was the hospital chain that became the emblematic failure of the [[Private Equity Hospital Rollup]] model. Built by [[Cerberus Capital Management]] from a Boston Catholic system, stripped of its real estate through [[Medical Properties Trust]], and run in its last years by its physician-owners under CEO Ralph de la Torre, it went bankrupt in May 2024. It left closed hospitals, a dead patient and a Senate contempt citation that the Justice Department has never acted on. ## Timeline | Date | Event | |---|---| | 2010 | Cerberus buys **Caritas Christi**, the Archdiocese of Boston's six-hospital system, in a deal valued at about **$895M** including assumed debt, pensions and promised capital spending. Attorney General Martha Coakley's conditions: hospitals open at least three years, pensions funded, and five years of state monitoring. | | 2016 | **MPT deal, $1.25B:** about $600M as a sale-leaseback, about $600M in mortgage loans, and a $50M equity stake. It funded a **$484M** dividend to Cerberus (Brookings; the [[Cerberus Capital Management]] page has $473M). | | 2017 | Buys IASIS, peaking at 36 hospitals in 10 states. HQ moves to Dallas in 2018. | | 2020 | Cerberus exits; physicians led by de la Torre take 90%, financed by MPT. Cerberus's profit over the decade was about **$800M**. A further $111M dividend went to the physician-owners, $81.5M of it to de la Torre (Wikipedia). | | Oct 2023 | Sungida Rashid, 39, dies after giving birth at St. Elizabeth's in Brighton. Embolization coils that might have stopped her bleeding had been repossessed weeks earlier because Steward had not paid the supplier. | | May 6, 2024 | Chapter 11 in Houston: 31 hospitals, about $9B in liabilities. | | Aug 31, 2024 | **Carney Hospital** (Dorchester) and **Nashoba Valley Medical Center** (Ayer) close. Five other Massachusetts hospitals pass to Boston Medical Center, Brown University Health and Lawrence General on Oct 31. | | Sept 2024 | De la Torre defies a Senate HELP subpoena (Sept 12). The committee votes 20–0 for contempt, and on Sept 25 the full Senate refers him for **criminal contempt** by unanimous consent, the first such resolution in more than 50 years. He resigns as CEO effective Oct 1. | | Jan 8, 2025 | Gov. [[Maura Healey]] signs H.5159: new hospital campuses may not lease from real-estate investment trusts, and private-equity deals and sale-leasebacks need 60 days' notice. | | July 2025 | Steward's estate sues de la Torre and other insiders for about $1.4B. The liquidation plan is confirmed July 28. | | July 31, 2026 | The D.C. Circuit upholds dismissal of de la Torre's suit against the senators. | | Aug 2026 | Senators [[Bill Cassidy]] and [[Bernie Sanders]] ask [[Todd Blanche]]'s Justice Department where the contempt referral stands. **No charges** have been filed. | ## The money and the yachts While hospitals ran short of supplies, de la Torre's companies owned the 190-foot yacht *Amaral* (about $40M) and the sport-fishing boat *Jaruco* (about $15M). The Private Equity Stakeholder Project puts total extraction by Cerberus and the physician-owners at about $1.3B. In Malta, where Steward ran three hospitals, a 2024 magistrate's inquiry recommended bribery and money-laundering charges. Reports that U.S. prosecutors were examining possible foreign-bribery violations have produced no U.S. charges. ## Why it matters for the KB Steward is the template for the extraction model the vault tracks across sectors: buy an institution, sell its real estate, pay the owners, and leave the operating company carrying rent it cannot afford. It is also a case of accountability lapsing under the second Trump administration. A bipartisan criminal-contempt referral from the Senate has sat at the Justice Department for two years. ## See Also - [[Private Equity Hospital Rollup]] · [[Medical Properties Trust]] · [[Cerberus Capital Management]] - [[Healthcare Industry Ecosystem]] · [[Hospital Consolidation]] · [[Private Equity Sector]]