North Carolina’s attorney general alleges HCA Healthcare is violating the agreement that allowed it to buy Mission Health. The lawsuit follows a STAT investigation into quality issues at the system.

North Carolina’s attorney general is suing HCA Healthcare, alleging the for-profit hospital chain has “degraded” the formerly nonprofit Mission Health.

Attorney general Josh Stein’s complaint, filed Thursday, accuses the country’s largest hospital chain of failing to provide the emergency and cancer care it had promised to keep intact. Its nearly 60 pages describe a catastrophic state of dysfunction at Mission’s flagship Asheville hospital. They contain stunning allegations of patients being treated in waiting areas within full view of other patients, nurses emptying trash bins and delivering food, and patients found dead in emergency room beds hours after they died.

“For-profit HCA has broken its promise to the people of western North Carolina and to my office,” Stein said in a statement. “Quality health care is too important — in some cases, a matter of life and death. But HCA apparently cares more about its profits than its patients.”