Cerberus Capital Management, which bought a group of Massachusetts community hospitals in 2010, and Steward Health Care, the company led by de la Torre and formed to run them, promised to invest enough to make the facilities models of care and maximize shareholder value. They rejected the argument some of us made at the time, that the kind of profits they were anticipating were utterly incompatible with providing health services to low-income patients. Well, they got their payouts. And their patients got understaffed emergency rooms, canceled surgeries, postponed medical tests, and critical — in some cases deadly — equipment shortages.
