Patients will suffer with bankrupt health care firm's closure of Massachusetts hospitals, staff say

abcnews.go.com:

Christina Hernon was saved by a doctor at a local hospital when she was 5

AYER, Mass. — When Christina Hernon was 5, her throat swelled shut from an infection and her mother rushed her to a local Massachusetts hospital in the dead of night. She couldn't breathe, suffered a seizure and was near death when a doctor saved her by inserting a tube down her throat.

Hernon is now an emergency physician at one of two hospitals in the state that are due to close on Saturday. She and others among the 1,250 affected staff at Nashoba Valley Medical Center in Ayer and Carney Hospital in Boston believe that patients like she was will suffer and could even die as a result of the closures because they won't have time to make it to other hospitals farther away.

“I would consider it guaranteed that there will be some negative outcomes," Hernon said. “To add on an additional 20, 25 minutes, or over, of travel time is potentially the difference between life and death.”

Staff are furious because they say that behind the failure of the Dallas-based company that owns the hospitals, Steward Health Care, lies a story of alleged corporate greed involving one of their own.

Former Massachusetts heart surgeon Ralph de la Torre, who founded Steward and remains its chief executive, extracted more than $100 million from the company before it filed for bankruptcy in May, according to lawsuits and bankruptcy filings. The company had earlier cashed in by selling all its hospitals for $1.2 billion and then leasing them back from the new owners. The company described it as an “asset-light” model designed to prioritize patient care.

But a lawsuit filed by Aya Healthcare in Texas claims that during the COVID-19 pandemic, Steward elected to rain cash on its