Wall Street Gutted Steward Health Care. Patients Paid the Price.

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Sungida Rashid had no intention of taking an Uber to the birth of her first child. She’d never been one to take the easy route, and besides, she wanted to get things moving—and walking seemed the best way to do it. So on an overcast Sunday in October 2023, Sungida and her husband, Nabil Haque, set out from their Boston apartment to St. Elizabeth’s Medical Center, the local hospital where ­Sungida, nine months pregnant, was scheduled to be induced.

Sungida and Nabil had met 12 years earlier while working at a consulting firm in their native Bangladesh. Over lunches, they began strategizing about PhD applications, eventually spending years in a long-distance relationship as they fell in love and pursued their doctoral degrees in the United States. Then there was a tiny pandemic wedding, a move to Bangkok for work (she was an economics professor, he a climate researcher), a heartbreaking miscarriage, the cautious joy of another pregnancy, and finally, when Sungida was seven months along, a job opportunity for Nabil at Boston University.

Sungida had waved off her husband’s suggestion that they delay his start date so she could stick with her doctors in ­Bangkok. She’d long dreamed of teaching at an American university, and the pandemic had upended several job prospects. Living in Boston would give her the chance to pursue a professorship again and, more importantly, to raise their little girl far from Bangladesh, in a country that offered greater opportunities, cleaner air, and better medical care.

In their first days in Boston, Nabil set up appointments at two prospective hospitals: Brigham and Women’s, a world-­renowned nonprofit medical center, and St. Elizabeth’s, a humbler facility owned by a national for-profit hospital chain called Steward Health Care. The appointment at St. Elizabeth’s came first, and Sungida liked the midwife, so they canceled the other appointment. A few weeks later, they walked in and got ready for her induction.