Steward chief Ralph de la Torre has two yachts, not one
There’s no graceful way to confess this: I somehow missed a yacht.
Last week, I wrote that Ralph de la Torre, the chief executive officer of Steward Health Care, is the proud owner of a $40 million, 190-foot yacht named the Amaral, a boat that has six bedrooms, cabins for as many as 15 members of the crew, a gym, a living room, dining room, and so much more.
De la Torre bought the yacht a few years ago as he and his private equity partners were selling the land and buildings out from under their own hospitals, burdening Steward with hundreds of millions of dollars in annual rent while giving themselves massive paydays. Now, as Steward faces a financial crisis that threatens to wreak havoc on health care in Massachusetts, this lovely boat is bobbing in the waters of Panama, on the Pacific side of the canal.
Here’s where I fell down on the job. It never occurred to me that a guy who owned one yacht might actually want two. That’s a lot of decks to swab. I never thought to ask anyone if de la Torre was trying to assemble a flotilla. Clearly I have more to learn about the rich and (striving to be) famous.
To back up for a moment, I received an email from an eagle-eyed reader shortly after my column on the Amaral. It said: “Correction: Ralph has two giant yachts.” Ha-ha, that’s funny in a completely absurd kind of way. But as I clicked out, something nagged, that being Ralph de la Torre’s personality, so I started poking around the shockingly vast yachting community on the World Wide Web.
And there it was, just a few keystrokes away: The Jaruco.
The Jaruco is, as the mariners call it, a sport fishing boat. But that would be like describing a Rolls Royce as a kind of car.
First off, the Jaruco is 90 feet long. It’s valued at about $15 million. There are hallways and bedrooms and full-sized baths. The yacht’ builder described it as “the most ambitious custom sportfish boat ever built.”
“The owner put it to us in pretty definitive terms,” the lead designer said on a video posted on the yacht builder’s website. “He just wanted to build the absolute finest sport fishermen ever built. That was it.”
Pause here to wonder: Has any doctor, any nurse, any patient, any anyone, ever said or even thought that Ralph de la Torre sought to build the absolute finest hospitals in the world?
In the same video, a man identified as the buyer’s agent, simply said, “You have this customer willing to do anything to build the best.”
And so they did. They used carbon and titanium to reduce the weight of the yacht by 40,000 to 50,000 pounds compared to others in its class. They spent $5 million on engineering alone. They took three years to finish the job. All this allowed the Jaruco to move faster, maneuver more nimbly, and travel farther — a rich fisherman’s dream. Imagine having a health care company that could do the same.
Maybe it’s nobody’s business that Ralph de la Torre likes fishing. Maybe it doesn’t matter that he has an affinity for especially nice things. If he owned and ran a chain of well-resourced hospitals that set an uncompromisingly high standard for patient care in Massachusetts and beyond, maybe nobody would care.
The problem is, he doesn’t. His hospitals are struggling to stay afloat, no pun intended. Supplies are short, medical tools are being repossessed, vendors aren’t getting paid, all while hundreds of millions of dollars have flowed into the pockets of a bunch of private equity partners at Cerberus Capital Management and de la Torre himself.
Why is it important that he owns two yachts, not one? Because hospitals, even for-profit ones, are something of a public trust. Because Steward has flat out refused to comply with Massachusetts law and turn over annual financial statements to the state’s Center for Health Information and Analysis. The last audited statement they provided was nearly 10 years ago. They’ve fought the agency in state court and lost. Steward lawyers have now taken the case to appeals court. They obviously are hellbent against letting regulators know where all the money has gone.
But two big boats provide one pretty solid clue.
Imagine, just imagine, how much better Steward might be doing if Cerberus had only doubled its investment and yanked out $400 million instead of the $800 million reported by Bloomberg? How many more doctors, nurses, technicians, pieces of equipment could Steward afford to have if de la Torre had a thing for Boston Whalers rather than small ships that can sail across the biggest seas?
Yes, Steward is right when they say that Medicaid needs to pay more for care, that regulators need to allow higher reimbursement rates, that their hospitals – utterly vital institutions – face obstacles that more prestigious institutions in wealthier communities will never know. But Steward’s owners, de la Torre especially, are a profoundly flawed messenger for these serious issues.
They put their own financial well-being ahead of the health of their own hospitals and the patients they serve. So now, state officials are struggling to stave off an even worse crisis. It’s not just de la Torre’s two yachts that are at sea.
STEWARD
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