The Department of Veterans Affairs is expected to announce Friday it will close its Lakeside hospital to inpatients, turning the downtown facility into an outpatient clinic and leaving only one full-service VA hospital in the city.
Sens. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and Peter Fitzgerald (R-Ill.) said the department informed them Thursday of plans to shift inpatient care at VA Chicago Health Care System Lakeside division to the West Side division. Agency officials declined comment but scheduled a news conference for 2 p.m. Friday.
A consultants’ study for the VA, released last summer, had recommended closing Lakeside as a step to help the department move operations out of aging buildings and use money saved on infrastructure for improved health care. VA officials have said they would like to use the Chicago region as a test for a nationwide effort to reduce costs and change the focus of veteran care.
As word leaked out to worried and angry area veterans, advocates were already planning demonstrations to coincide with the announcement Friday and again Saturday morning.
“We’re not going to let them do this,” said John Borg, president of the advocacy group Veterans for Unification. “It’s going to hurt veterans.”
Both organizers and patients cited the quality of Lakeside’s care, noting that it shares doctors with nearby Northwestern Memorial Hospital.
“If it wasn’t for this hospital, I’d be dead now,” said Darrell Taylor, 48, as he sat with his guitar outside Lakeside on Thursday. Taylor said he had been treated there over the years for dog bites, gunshot wounds and a heart attack. “People like me come here from Indiana, Chicago and all over everywhere because they have fine doctors here,” he said.
“It gives veterans access to what I think immodestly are the best physicians in America,” said Jeffrey Miller, Northwestern University Medical School’s chief operating officer.
Miller said the closing may end the affiliation between the medical school and the VA, a teaching partnership that dates to 1946 and is one of the nation’s oldest such programs. Nearly 300 Northwestern doctors donate care worth about $4 million a year, Miller said.
Lakeside’s closing is expected to be part of a larger plan, to be unveiled Friday by Dr. Leo S. Mackay Jr., Veterans Affairs deputy secretary, outlining the future of veterans health care in Chicagoland, Wisconsin and parts of Michigan and Indiana.
Under the plan, the VA will upgrade and expand facilities at West Side, Hines Hospital in Maywood and its North Chicago facility, Durbin and Fitzgerald confirmed.
The VA plans to build a new rehabilitation center for blindness and spinal cord injuries at Hines. The inpatient floors at Hines and West Side would be renovated. North Chicago, meanwhile, would agree to share medical services with Great Lakes Naval Training Station.
But for Robert Flowers, the commander of American Legion Post 915, anything less than care at Lakeside seems like a slap in the face.
“This is the best of the four [VA hospitals],” he said. “The treatment here is past 100 percent.”
Veterans weren’t alone in their concern about the closure. Staff members gathered in the cold parking lot to talk about the latest rumors swirling around the aging hospital.
“I guess they’re going to close it,” said ward clerk James Bonney, 50. “I have issues with that, like where are they going to place all the workers? This is the federal government and I know they’re not just going to let everybody go.”
Miller said Northwestern has offered the VA several alternatives, including relocating Lakeside into the newer Prentice Hospital rent-free so the VA could sell or lease the prime real estate under Lakeside.
The school plans to turn to legislators to fight the decision.
Congress may not have power over the decision, but it does have a say in future budgets, said Billy Weinberg, press secretary for House Veterans’ Affairs Committee member Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill.). Gutierrez has urged the VA to reconsider its plan and start a new study.
“This is a time we should be honoring our troops, both active duty and those who have already served,” Weinberg said.
Durbin said he sees no way to realistically reverse the decision in the Senate.
“There was a lot of debate over this,” he said in a statement Thursday. “I’m sorry we have to see such dramatic change at Lakeside. I know that the veterans organizations who fought hard on the battlefield and fought hard to keep their hospital open will be disappointed, but I hope they will join us in Washington to fight just as hard to make sure that the new Lakeside outpatient facility is the best in the nation.”
Fitzgerald said veterans will benefit from the long-overdue renovations at Hines, including the clinic that will treat soldiers blinded or injured in the spine while serving.
