35
HEALTHCARE
NEWS
Sutter Health Destroys Evidence in Antitrust Case Over
Inflated Prices
By Ayla Ellison
S
acramento, Calif.-based Sutter Health
destroyed 192 boxes of documents
requested by plaintiffs in an antitrust
lawsuit, San Francisco County Superior Court
Judge Curtis E.A. Karnow stated in a Nov. 13
ruling.
e lawsuit, filed by employers and labor
unions in April 2014, accuses Sutter of abusing
its market power to charge inflated prices.
Judge Karnow said Sutter knew the documents
it destroyed were "relevant to antitrust issues"
when the system intentionally destroyed the
evidence in 2015, according to Kaiser Health
News.
According to a 2015 internal email cited by
Judge Karnow, Melissa Brendt, Sutter's vice presi-
dent and chief contracting officer in the man-
aged care department, and an assistant general
counsel authorized Sina Santagata, who served
as Ms. Brendt's executive assistant, to destroy
managed care documents dating back to 1995.
e documents were scheduled to be destroyed
20 years later, in 2035.
In an email sent to Ms. Brendt July 30, 2015, Ms.
Santagata stated, "I've pushed the button … if
someone is in need of a box between 3/15/95 &
11/23/05 … I'm running and hiding."
A Sutter spokeswoman told Kaiser Health
News the destruction of the documents was a
mistake. "We regret that as part of a routine
archiving process we failed to preserve some
boxes of decades-old hard-copy documents,"
she said.
However, in his 12-page ruling, the judge dis-
agreed. "e circumstances of the document
destruction were, to put it as mildly as I can,
decidedly odd, and Sutter has not explained
them except to argue it was all a mistake," he
said. "But the record shows that Sutter's con-
duct was more than just an inadvertent error."
e judge ordered Sutter to examine email
backup tapes to look for documents cover-
ing some of the same issues as the destroyed
records. n
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