A Major Roger Marshall Donor Is a Hospital Bandit

This is part one of a two-part story. Read part two here.

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.

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 assets of Noble Health Corp.,” the lawsuit alleged.  

Then Noble “sold” the two hospitals—for a dollar apiece—to an outfit called Platinum Neighbors, which promised to assume Noble’s liabilities and reopen them by September 2022; you will be shocked to learn that never happened. A third potential rescue agent flew in from Georgia to survey the damage and confirmed the anonymous figure that had been floating around: the hospitals owed between $45-$50 million to creditors. Someone named Clifford Sullivan acquired the hospitals from Platinum in early December 2022, but by the end of the month had passed them to a fifth entity called Ziva Medical, whose point of contact registered with the state department of corporations was one Elliott Teitelbaum of Brooklyn, New York, whose LinkedIn profile lists “1-hour LLC Formations” as his primary occupation. Its real owners were a trio of investors based in Lakewood, New Jersey, who finally filed three bankruptcy petitions on behalf of the hospitals the following year.

A detailed forensic analysis of the flow of funds in and out of the hospitals remains ongoing, according to Todd Werts, an attorney in Columbia, Missouri, who has already sifted through some 50,000 documents on behalf of the hospitals’ stiffed workers but says he still has not received everything he has requested from the Nueterra entities. Back in 2024, the Ziva Medical crew agreed to pay the workers a $2 million settlement in four installments, but they ultimately paid just $500,000, and a bankruptcy judge dismissed the bankruptcy entirely last year after a court-appointed trustee filed a motion claiming the subsidiary had failed for nearly a year to make even the $250 quarterly payments owed to the court for monitoring its compliance with the terms of the settlement. 

Werts also tried to hit up Platinum and its owner Ryan Cole for their share of the settlement, but when Cole and his wife filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy protection last year, the filing listed the $7.613 million debt owed to Noble’s former employees among a staggering $98.4 million in personal debts and liabilities against just $2 million in assets. 

So now, his focus is on Nueterra and its principals, including Dan Tasset. Over the summer, Tasset filed an affidavit acknowledging his ownership of various vehicles that brought about the hospitals’ demise. Many mysteries remain unsolved: the $20 million in COVID funds that a 2022 report from Kaiser Health News reported were “still not fully accounted for” remain something of a puzzle. And there’s at least $1.1 million in rent and administrative fees Noble and NueHealth extracted from Callaway alone during the brief period it was open, and it seems likely Audrain had similar fee extractions.

The litigation is just about all that is left of the hospitals. Audrain’s buildings were purchased by the city of Mexico, Missouri, and Audrain County in a foreclosure sale last year, and the city manager said it wouldn’t be used as a hospital again. Callaway was converted into a youth treatment center; 24-hour care in the city of Fulton no longer exists. The closure of the hospitals led to the closure of nearby clinics. “It felt like we lived in a health desert,” said one area resident. 

“Audrain has always been a part of my life,” a local named Alice Weeks commented on Noble’s Facebook post announcing the hospital’s closure. “My main health care provider. My employer for many years. Stopped working there to be on the Board of Trustees. Worked diligently to maintain and improve quality of care offered. Also spent 17 days as a very sick patient. Am lost now.” 

THE CLOSEST NUETERRA EVER CAME to something resembling accountability is the case of the Miami International Medical Center, a hospital it bought in late 2013 with promises of turning it into a mecca of medical tourism. Instead, Nueterra sold its underlying real estate for $47 million, struggled to attract patients, and shut the hospital down three years later, leaving some $15.2 million in unpaid bills and stranding poor, elderly, and largely Hispanic residents who relied on the hospital it replaced without nearby services. A court-appointed bankruptcy trustee wound up getting Nueterra to agree to pay $2.8 million to the estate, though given that it had plenty of its own claims against the estate, it’s unclear whether they ever fully “paid up.” 

That’s a familiar pattern. Once upon a time a Florida physical therapist who’d had a falling out with Nueterra filed for bankruptcy protection in an attempt to discharge a $161,383 debt he owed to Tasset’s empire. Nueterra filed a motion to dismiss the bankruptcy altogether for reasons of “bad faith.” The judge ruled in favor, and when the physical therapist, who claimed a net worth of around $4,000, appealed, the appeals court upheld the ruling. 

No evidence shows that Marshall profited from the specific Nueterra vehicles that engineered the demise of the hospitals in Missouri and Florida. But it’s also not clear how much that matters. A wrongful termination lawsuit filed last year by a former president of two Nueterra companies claims that ValueHealth and NueHealth were, for all intents and purposes, the same, and that further, none of the Tasset companies were discrete, self-sustaining firms but rather a collection of “entit[ies] whose assets and interests are intertwined with other corporate entities owned and controlled” by Tasset, his sister Denise Mayhew, and their trusts. (The case remains pending.)

What we do know is that Tasset and Marshall have a long history of business partnerships.

In 1998, the Surgical and Diagnostic Center of Great Bend was incorporated in Kansas with ten founding members: Marshall, eight other doctors, and Tasset’s investment firm, then known as ASC Group. Marshall was invested in Great Bend through at least four different Marshall entities for the entire time he practiced medicine before entering politics; the investment came out to somewhere between $1 million and $5 million, according to a 2015 congressional disclosure. In 2005, Marshall was listed as the chairperson of the Board of Members of the hospital, and in 2015 he was also designated as chair. A periodic transaction report shows that he sold “redeemed units” in the hospital upon his exit in 2017; the hospital is now part of the University of Kansas Health System.

New entities linked financially to the hospital kept popping up over the years, including GBRH Properties 2009. Laina Marshall, Roger’s wife, has had an enduring stake in the 2009 LLC, with at least 14 percent ownership; she currently serves as the mail contact for the entity. The asset value is listed consistently between $50,000 and $100,000 in congressional financial disclosures. 

In the 2003 annual report of Tasset’s parent company, Health Care Development Co. seen by the Prospect—though it has been taken down from the Kansas secretary of state’s website— Marshall is listed as one of six investors with more than 5 percent of the company stock (Tasset was one of the others). It was the only annual report to name the stockholders. Health Care Development Co. is the majority owner of Nueterra.

The Marshall family had an interest in Nueterra’s flagship $50 million venture capital fund, Healthcare Ventures Fund IV. As noted on Sen. Marshall’s 2019 and 2020 financial disclosure forms, Laina and the family’s holding company LVMC had “subscription agreements” with the fund, which translated into minor stakes in four companies, including IVXpress, a small chain of ambulatory infusion centers whose president, Donald Peterson, Nueterra detailed to Noble in 2019 after settling a whistleblower lawsuit a former IVXpress employee had filed alleging the company had systematically defrauded the government, with an agreement to refrain from billing the Medicare program for five years. 

The Healthcare Ventures holding was just one of several Tasset-linked investments the Marshall family had made over the years. Healthcare Properties Fund I owned stakes in eight surgery centers in six states, including the hospital buildings in Great Bend and another facility in Wichita; between 2015 and 2019, Laina Marshall received between $410,923 and $1,749,500 in income from that investment. A third fund, NCM Bioscience Partners, gave the Marshalls a stake in two agribusiness start-ups and a medical device distributor. 

PERHAPS UNSURPRISINGLY, MARSHALL has spent much of his decade in public service serving the interests of health care profiteers—including his friends at Nueterra. 

In 2017, Marshall cosponsored legislation called the Patient Access to Higher Quality Health Care Act, which would have amended the Affordable Care Act to repeal restrictions on physician self-referrals in the context of physician-owned hospitals, like the one he and Tasset cofounded in 1998; Tasset claims to have opened more than 150 such ventures over the years. Marshall would reintroduce the bill in three successive Congresses. A different bill Marshall introduced in 2025, the Physician Led and Rural Access to Quality Care Act, would “expand flexibilities” for self-referrals, while making it easier for physicians and their family members to invest in hospitals.

At a glance, allowing hospitals owned by physicians to refer patients to themselves appears to be an enormous conflict of interest. The physician-owned hospital provisions have long been a sore spot for the physicians’ lobby, especially as the uptick of private equity takeovers following Obamacare’s passage proved over and over again that the health care system had far graver problems than physician self-referral, and as the concept of “physician-owned hospitals” was corrupted by private equity firms securing doctors who are hospital owners in name only. (In 2013, it’s probably worth noting, Marshall’s own Great Bend Regional Hospital had been one of at least 25 physician-owned hospitals unsuccessfully—and somewhat dubiously—sued for violating federal anti-kickback legislation by a longtime executive of the for-profit hospital chain IASIS Healthcare.) 

Marshall has lent a hand to other health care interests besides Nueterra. Last summer, Thomas Vo, the founder of a notorious chain of freestanding emergency rooms that has raked in billions of dollars gaming the “dispute resolution” system instituted by surprise billing legislation, gave Sen. Marshall a personal shout-out during an investor conference call for the bill he had cosponsored with Sen. Michael Bennet (CO) to address the problem by cracking down on… insurance companies. Private equity-owned TeamHealth, which has long been accused of jacking up surprise emergency room bills on patients, is on Marshall’s list of maxed-out donors this cycle. 

And though he serves on the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee, Marshall has never been much of a presence during the committee’s hearings on the $10 billion collapse of Steward Health, a mega-Noble that bought and plundered some 40 safety net hospitals between 2010 and its 2024 bankruptcy with deadly and horrific consequences in states from Massachusetts to Louisiana. The horror stories elicited expressions of outrage even from such conservative stalwarts as Mitt Romney, whose own Bain Capital made billions on its leveraged buyout of health care giant HCA. Perhaps Marshall had his own reasons to keep mum about Steward’s plundering: in 2022 the hospital chain had paid an eye-popping $60 million for the shuttered Miami hospital Tasset & Co had bankrupted five years earlier.