‘Where do they go?’ What West Side patients face after their hospital closes. 5%
By Kristen Schorsch0% WBEZ0%
7/11/2026, 11:00:00 AM
BS Summary: This article contains 12 faulty reasoning types, including Anecdotal, Slippery Slope, and Availability Heuristic, with Framing Effect as the most egregious example at 25.5% saturation with 794 hits. Analysis detected 1,392 faulty-reasoning hits from 3,115 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 19.9% and a BS Rank of 5% (13,567 of 14,149 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 95.90% of the article peer group.
Shantis Johnson gently grabs her round belly, bulging with twins due in August, and wishes she could deliver them at West Suburban Medical Center, where her other children were born.
“Once you know home, it’s home,” says Johnson, 38.
“West Suburban was home to me.”
She lives in the same house where she grew up in Chicago’s Austin community, about three miles from West Suburban in Oak Park, which closed in late March.
She and her children were frequent visitors to the emergency department and walk-in clinic.
She would see the familiar faces of doctors and nurses, people who helped deliver her kids and watched them grow.
What worries her the most is an emergency.
Johnson uses the ER about once or twice a year when she can’t get asthma attacks under control.
She says she once drove herself to West Suburban while struggling to breathe because it was close, and she hasn’t had good experiences at other nearby hospitals.
“What if people just start dying, you know?
Johnson asks.
“Because they can’t get to the hospital on time.
That’s my biggest fear.”
It’s been more than three months since West Suburban abruptly closed .
A quick trip in an emergency has turned into a 10- to 20-minute drive to hospitals already stretched thin, or have emergency departments so packed they’re on the cusp of turning away ambulances, state records obtained by WBEZ and the Chicago Sun-Times show.
Some doctors from West Suburban work at hospitals where patients are getting care now, places that also treat a lot of people who are low income or don’t have health insurance.
They worry which hospital could shutter next, that this could be the beginning of a wave of potential closures.
West Suburban Medical Center in Oak Park abruptly closed in late March.
Doctors worry more struggling hospitals could face the same fate as big cuts to Medicaid loom.
Pat Nabong/Sun-Times
Big cuts to Medicaid public health insurance for people who are poor or have disabilities are coming next year.
In Illinois, around one in four people have Medicaid.
More than 400,000 people could lose coverage , meaning less money for hospitals that treat them.
Many hospitals are in a precarious position.
More than a dozen have racked up over $700 million in debt to the state — in many cases to help keep their doors open, according to records WBEZ and the Sun-Times obtained.
The state has only received or clawed back about $100 million.
Several hospitals have not kept up with how much they agreed to pay back, a spokeswoman for the Illinois Department of Healthcare and Family Services says.
HFS approved the funds and allowed debt to swell.
HFS Director Elizabeth Whitehorn declined an interview.
Most of the hospitals, known as safety nets, typically treat people no matter if they can pay.
So they struggle to make ends meet.
What’s more, several of these hospitals would currently not even qualify for a new state loan program designed to help them because they’re “delinquent” in repaying their debt.
None of this will stop people from showing up with heart attacks or strokes, a serious injury or a shooting.
“West Suburban is the first of many dominoes to fall,” predicts Dr.
Vishnu Chundi, an infectious disease specialist who spent more than 15 years at West Suburban.
‘It’s like a chess game’
Located just across the street from Austin, West Suburban was a destination for the majority Black neighborhood, which has one of the lowest life expectancies in Chicago.
Residents here can expect to live on average to 73, compared to 88 in the Loop, where most people are white — a 15-year gap.
It’s more common for people in Austin to die of cancer, heart disease or diabetes than in other parts of Chicago — conditions that put them at higher risk for being hospitalized.
Pastor Ira Acree, who leads Greater St.
John Bible Church in Austin, is part of a group of pastors and doctors who are calling out what they say is a lack of urgency and accountability from Democratic Illinois Gov.
JB Pritzker and state and federal lawmakers.
“We cannot accept a standard of care for the West Side that would not be tolerated in wealthier neighborhoods,” Acree implored about 50 community leaders during a recent meeting.
Pastor Ira Acree, who leads Greater St.
John Bible Church in Austin, during a rally in late May with dozens of religious leaders, health care workers and community members outside West Suburban Medical Center to demand its reopening.
Pat Nabong/Sun-Times
Doctors who spent decades at West Suburban, and still work in the community, say the quality of care started to decline before the hospital’s sudden closure in March.
Longtime orthopedic surgeon Dr.
Victor Romano stopped taking his elective cases to West Suburban around the time Manoj Prasad took over in 2022.
Romano worried if something happened to his patients in the middle of the night, there wouldn’t be doctors in the intensive care unit to take care of them.
Federal inspectors were concerned about this, too, when they found patients at the hospital could be at risk of serious harm or death.
A company repossessed a robot he used for knee replacements, Romano says.
He opted to perform surgeries at other hospitals that kept their operating rooms cool.
At West Suburban, temperatures in the ORs climbed into the 80s, he says.
“You don’t want to be sweating into the wound,” Romano says, adding that humidity could breed infection.
On March 25, Prasad revealed a massive billing issue .
West Suburban took in just 10 to 15% of its usual income in the last year.
He struggled to pay staff, and abruptly suspended services.
He called it temporary.
Now the hospital’s fate is being battled in court .
Prasad declined an interview.
About 70 patients still in the hospital when it closed were discharged or transferred to others.
Some of Chundi’s patients in intensive care ended up at a hospital nearly 10 miles away, about an hour-long drive in traffic.
Then a building filled with doctor’s offices on West Suburban’s campus closed for a few weeks when the elevators broke — again.
John Romando was a West Suburban patient for about 30 years before it closed.
When the medical office building on campus closed, too, he had to suddenly travel farther from home for hours-long dialysis treatments three days a week.
Manuel Martinez/WBEZ
Another long-time patient, John Romando suddenly had to get dialysis somewhere else.
He traveled nearly 30 minutes from home, roughly double his commute to West Suburban, and at a time that he says disrupts his work day running a towing company.
Romando sits in a chair for about three to four hours, three days a week, as a machine filters and cleans his blood, something his failing kidneys can no longer do.
The experience can be scary, he says.
Afterward, he feels weak.
He was upset his girlfriend wasn’t allowed to sit with him at the new location to put him at ease.
He says he was a patient at West Suburban for about 30 years.
It’s where his two sons were born, and where he was rushed and treated for two heart attacks.
“It's the only hospital I ever went to,” says Romando, 59.
“I knew everybody, all the nurses, the doctors.
You walk in the door.
‘How you doing, Mr.
Romando?’”
PCC Community Wellness Center, which has about a dozen clinics in the Chicago area, was closely intertwined with West Suburban.
They’ve squeezed hundreds of people they treated each week at the medical office building into their other clinics, says Dr.
Paul Luning, PCC’s chief medical officer.
Before West Suburban’s closure, Meghan Nolan knew just what to do for her patients.
She’s director of reproductive services at PCC.
For example, a pregnant woman with a concerning condition who needs an ultrasound the same day.
Nolan would have called up a radiology tech at West Suburban she knew, who would get patients in, then call back with results.
A patient wouldn’t get lost.
“Now, if a patient that lives in Austin has that, where do they go?”
she asks.
She taps one of her strengths: a running list of resources because she has to consider a lot more.
How would patients get to another hospital?
Is it accessible by public transit?
Many patients don’t have a car, but if they do, is parking free?
Do they take a patient’s insurance, if they have any?
“It’s like a chess game,” Nolan says.
“I’ve worked in Austin for almost 11 years.
Most of my patients could walk to West Sub.”
Meghan Nolan, director of reproductive services at PCC Community Wellness Center, says before West Suburban closed, most of her patients in Chicago’s nearby Austin community could walk to the hospital.
Manuel Martinez/WBEZ
Struggling hospitals try to absorb West Suburban’s load
For years, doctors at West Suburban stabilized the steady flow of people who were shot and made their way to the emergency department.
Austin has one of the highest gun-related homicide rates in Chicago .
In 2023, about 25,000 people were treated in the emergency department, the hospital's most recent data shows.
Now those patients have to go somewhere else.
Some people have found their way to Loretto Hospital in Austin, about two miles south of West Suburban, a roughly 10-minute drive.
Loretto CEO Tesa Anewishki confirms the small hospital is a lot busier.
Ambulance runs have more than doubled, pushing up wait times, she says.
There are more critically ill patients, and outpatient services are much busier, too.
Patients coming from West Suburban often have more complex illnesses and are sicker, says Tariq Mubarak, a primary care physician who worked at West Suburban for about a decade before it closed.
He’s also chief medical officer of a private practice whose doctors work at safety net hospitals on the West Side.
“Loretto is definitely feeling the stress and the pressure from the closure of West Suburban,” Mubarak says.
But Anewishki says Loretto has capacity and welcomes the business.
Loretto Hospital is a lot busier since nearby West Suburban closed in March, but the CEO says the hospital in Chicago’s Austin community has capacity.
Anthony Vazquez/Sun-Times
“Our team has actually been excited,” she says.
She wants to change the perception of Loretto, which is still dealing with a COVID-19 vaccine scandal under a previous CEO, from a hospital known for treating mental health issues, into one that provides a bevy of services.
Anewishki acknowledges how much money Loretto owes the state.
She says she’s paid back about $1.5 million so far of about $31 million in taxes, penalties and advances owed as of March.
Loretto has been barred from a separate bucket of state money for safety net hospitals for not getting audits in on time, records show.
Anewishki says Loretto had an IT breach and should be caught up with audits in the next few months.
“We’re operating very stretched right now,” she says, expecting to end the most recent fiscal year with a $10 million operating loss.
At the same time, Anewishki says she’s in talks with the state on how they can support Loretto given the unexpected sudden surge in patients.
The majority of Loretto’s patients have Medicaid health insurance.
The hospital gets on average about 32 cents for every $1 spent to treat them, Anewishki estimates.
“We don’t have the luxury to pull down from endowments and other funding pools when something breaks,” Anewishki says.
“We have to pull from operations.”
An emergency chiller is cooling the century-old hospital, while the names of millionaire donors are etched on gleaming new buildings of academic medical centers across town.
Meanwhile, the emergency department at another hospital about two miles west of West Suburban, a 10-minute drive, where former patients might head is crowded, too.
Records show the ER at Rush Oak Park Hospital was on “peak census,” or nearly closed to ambulances, for about 26 days from mid-April — a few weeks after West Suburban’s sudden closure — roughly through June.
Several patients lingered in the ER on and off, waiting for a bed.
That’s compared to just two days of peak census spanning the same time frame before West Suburban’s closure.
Some of the recent ER crowding has to do with the closure, but Rush Oak Park CEO Dr.
Dino Rumoro says the ER has been getting busier for years.
Also, the hospital only staffs for about half of the beds they have, while some patients are sicker and stay in the hospital longer, which leads to back ups in the ER for people waiting for a bed, Rumoro says.
He’s asked the state if he can open a dormant unit to treat more patients.
At Community First Medical Center in Portage Park, about four miles north of West Suburban, a roughly 20-minute ride, the ER is slammed while the hospital is understaffed, says nurse Margaret Polakow.
She says she worked several 80-hour weeks.
Some critically ill patients are stuck in the ER, some on breathing machines, waiting for beds in the intensive care unit because there aren’t enough nurses upstairs, she says.
Some patients who live near West Suburban told Polakow they put off going to another hospital because they didn’t want to travel farther from home, so they arrived at Community First sicker, in kidney and respiratory failure, she says.
Some are shocked at the conditions they see in the ER, Polakow says.
Old, dirty rooms with broken beds, some rigged with medical tape to keep the rails up.
Water doesn’t run in some sinks.
“The stuff that we just accept and live with is really ridiculous,” Polakow says.
““I equate it to M*A*S*H*,” the TV Show where a surgical team works in a war zone.
Dr.
Neil Rosenberg, a lung specialist who has worked at the hospital for more than 40 years, says it isn’t far behind West Suburban.
He’s watched specialists leave because they don’t get resources and support, which means fewer services for the community.
He worries for the months ahead.
“I can’t imagine what it’s going to be like in the winter,” when flu season hits and hospitals can fill up with sick patients, Rosenberg says.
Community First owed about $68 million in taxes and penalties to the state as of March, and has received at least $9 million in advances since 2019, state records show.
Hospital administrators did not respond to requests to comment.
In a statement about the West Suburban closure, a spokesperson for the Illinois Department of Public Health, which regulates hospitals, says they have “focused our efforts on ensuring continuity of care for impacted patients and maintaining access to health care services for community residents,” but declined an interview to explain how.
Mubarak questions if the state is doing enough.
He wonders, who is actually going to take care of all of these patients?
“You try your best.
You do your best,” he says.
But, “it’s just common sense.”
Searching for solutions and accountability
Pritzker declined an interview.
In a statement, a spokesperson for the governor says despite state support, West Suburban is ultimately a private business that “was both unable and unwilling to do everything in its power necessary to keep the facility in operation.”
Other elected officials say they’re hosting community meetings and pushing the state to give more money to hospitals absorbing patients.
“My style is not generally to scream and pound my fists and look for the nearest television camera,” says State Sen.
Don Harmon, an Oak Park Democrat.
Dr.
Vishnu Chundi, an infectious disease specialist, is part of a group of doctors and pastors on the West Side who are calling out what they say is a lack of urgency and accountability from Gov.
JB Pritzker and lawmakers about West Suburban’s closing.
Pat Nabong/Sun-Times
Doctors and pastors sounding the alarm question how closely the state vetted Prasad to buy a hospital, and then make sure it was being run appropriately.
“Why aren’t these various governing bodies concerned about what happened to the money?,” asks Dr.
George Naratadam, a nephrologist who worked at West Suburban for about 16 years.
Prasad closed West Suburban and Weiss Memorial in Uptown without reimbursing the state more than $100 million in advances, taxes and penalties.
The state has recouped at least $13 million so far.
“Penalizing a hospital that already can’t financially meet the needs that they have to provide care in the community isn’t really going to go very far,” says State Rep.
Anna Moeller, an Elgin Democrat who leads a bipartisan group of lawmakers overseeing Medicaid issues.
Still, more oversight is coming.
She points to the law Pritzker signed that phases out advances for hospitals and instead creates the new loan program next year, capped at $85 million a year.
That’s a drop in the bucket compared to what hospitals have received.
There will be stiffer guardrails.
For one, hospitals are ineligible if they are delinquent in reimbursing the state.
The state can immediately claw back money owed.
Any hospital in debt to the state must file plans that spell out what happens if they close.
The idea is to protect taxpayer dollars while preventing more closures, Moeller says, though clawing back money could put hospitals at risk.
In the meantime, doctors and pastors say the state needs to create a plan to fill the void West Suburban’s closure created — and for other communities where this could happen next.
Even in its final months as West Suburban deteriorated, Naratadam says, patients still showed up.
“That was a hospital that took patients who other places wouldn’t see,” he says.
Kristen Schorsch is a senior reporter for WBEZ covering public health.
Related
West Suburban Medical Center could lose power next month because of unpaid electric bill
West Suburban Medical Center struggled to treat patients months before closing
West Suburban Medical Center closing temporarily as it runs out of cash to pay employees
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