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Four months ago, a Kansas-based private equity mogul named Dan Tasset posted on LinkedIn about his admiration for a trusted representative in Congress. “I’ve known Senator Roger Marshall for many years and have long appreciated his willingness to engage thoughtfully on healthcare policy issues impacting physicians, patients, and independent care delivery,” Tasset wrote. He mentioned that Sen. Marshall recently met with an administrator from an ambulatory surgical center (ASC) who aimed to improve the Medicare reimbursement system. Tasset’s private equity firm, Nueterra, owns that surgical center, and he and his employee were promoting a bill that would make ASCs more attractive to patients.
“As both a physician and policymaker, Senator Marshall clearly understands many of the unintended incentives that continue pushing care toward higher-cost hospital outpatient settings, even when procedures can safely and effectively be performed in ASCs,” Tasset wrote, posting a picture of Marshall and the administrator at the bottom.
Tasset wasn’t just praising Marshall in his capacity as a constituent. He and Marshall have been business partners for nearly 30 years, going back to the co-ownership of a health facility in Great Bend, Kansas, in 1998. Marshall and his family have also invested in several of Tasset’s venture funds at Nueterra, where the business model is familiar for private equity forays into health care. Nueterra and its affiliates, which Tasset claims have developed “more than 150 surgical facilities across 38 states,” have a nasty habit of buying and strip-mining hospitals that spiral into bankruptcy. Two hospitals in Missouri and one in Florida have suffered this fate in the last decade.
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At his personal website, Tasset explains whose interests are favored in Nueterra’s business operations, and it’s not necessarily patients or medical professionals. “We have deployed more than $850 million in capital, helped create approximately $4.5 billion in enterprise value and distributed more than $3 billion to investors,” he writes.
Marshall and his family were among those investors. And when Marshall entered politics in 2016, Tasset was a reliable donor. Over the past decade, Marshall has benefited from over $218,000 in individual donations from employees of Nueterra and its subsidiaries, including $47,600 from Tasset himself. A Tasset entity called NueHarbor just pitched in $1,800 to Marshall’s campaign last week. In addition to direct funding, a Tasset-affiliated company gave $100,000 to a pro-Marshall super PAC that helped him win his Senate seat in 2020.
Marshall has worked hard to return the favor, repeatedly introducing legislation to benefit Nueterra. In at least one instance, legislation Marshall introduced benefited specific Tasset companies that Marshall’s family was also personally invested in.
There is less evidence about whether the Marshall family profited off some of Nueterra’s spectacular health care bankruptcies. The blizzard of Nueterra-linked corporate entities makes it hard to follow the money. What is more clear: Roger Marshall is a friend to, business partner with, and investor in a health care empire that has led to disaster on multiple occasions.
In a statement, Steve Roberts, a counsel for the Marshall campaign, said: “Senator Marshall operates in full compliance with all applicable rules and laws.”
Tasset did not respond to a request for comment.
THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN MARSHALL AND TASSET is unusually intertwined for a politician and donor. Marshall’s son, Victor, has since 2019 worked for a Tasset-owned entity called AvrioGlobal, after working as a research development analyst for Nueterra in 2009 and between 2011 and 2013. According to public records, Victor Marshall currently lives in a property in Washington owned by an entity called DC Real Estate Investment LLC, whose authorized agent is Dan Tasset.
In 2020, a Tasset family member, Landon Tasset, went to work for Marshall’s congressional office, first as an intern and then a junior staffer. When Marshall and his wife, Laina Marshall, decided to incorporate an LLC for the purpose of unspecified investments in 2021, they had Nueterra’s general counsel register it at Nueterra’s headquarters in Leawood, Kansas.
That very year, Nueterra happened to be on the verge of its first national headlines.
Back in 2019, Tasset had incorporated a new vehicle called Noble Health, ostensibly for the purpose of “rescuing” rural hospitals. Noble’s first “acquisition,” in 2020, was a hospital Neuterra had already run aground called Callaway Community Hospital in Fulton, Missouri, which the private equity firm had acquired in 2014 with promises to “re-energize the hospital and provide capital improvements” in a partnership with the University of Missouri health system. When that idea fizzled, Nueterra turned it over to a cabal called EmpowerHMS with a history of using rural hospitals as fronts for massive laboratory billing frauds; the founder, who was running EmpowerHMS when it started managing Callaway, is currently serving a 100-month federal prison sentence.
After the pandemic—and the blizzards of accompanying health care bailouts—Noble scooped up a facility in the nearby city of Mexico, Missouri, called Audrain Community Hospital.
Despite promises of investment, almost immediately the hospitals stopped paying their bills. Employees were paid for the first few months, but the hospitals quickly ran out of medicine, linens, personal protective gear, surgical equipment, even blood. More than 80 vendors, lenders, and other counterparties sued Noble, alleging the company had stiffed them by millions of dollars. In mid-2021, the few patients remaining at Callaway were deemed in such peril by state health inspectors—who witnessed a 77-year-old geriatric psychiatry patient on suicide watch stab herself in the leg with a pen—that they pulled all of them out of the hospital.
The employees were in for a rude awakening, too. In April 2022, the company stopped paying more than 440 of them altogether, and workers began to realize that Noble, despite having swallowed nearly $20 million in COVID-19 relief funds, had deducted insurance premiums from the paychecks they had received, without actually paying for the benefits.
The unpaid premiums amounted to just over a million dollars, but the damages to the system’s workers clocked in at $5.4 million, according to “interim findings” by the Department of Labor in 2023. The daughter of a 63-year-old janitor at Audrain was forced to sell her father’s possessions at a garage sale to pay for his cremation after she learned Nueterra had failed to make payments on his $60,000 life insurance policy. An ultrasound technologist whose husband had died of bladder cancer in December was left with nearly $300,000 in medical bills.
But in stark contrast to the six dozen or so young mothers who found themselves handcuffed and in some cases jailed after Marshall sued them for failing to pay medical bills as low as $101, neither Tasset nor anyone else at Nueterra has faced any real consequences for the ignoble eight-figure dine-and-dash that was “Noble Health.”
In March 2022, Noble abruptly shut both Missouri hospitals down, citing “an IT issue,” and according to a 2024 lawsuit, embarked on a “reorganization” that transferred Noble’s management and “people” subsidiaries into a new vehicle called Noble Health Services. “Former employees believe these to have been sham transfers made in an effort to separate liability for the then-imminently-missed payrolls from the primary as