The owner of the now-shuttered West Suburban Medical Center said Wednesday he hopes to reopen the hospital this summer – but a state lawmaker who represents the area is questioning whether that plan will become a reality.
“I have got full confidence that one way or the other we’ll be back to provide services,” Dr. Manoj Prasad, the owner, said at a Wednesday news conference, during which he spent more than an hour taking questions from reporters, turning defensive at times about his role in keeping the long-troubled Oak Park hospital from closure for this long.
Prasad said he was forced to close the hospital last week because of problems with its billing system that led to the hospital not being able to collect many payments for about a year. He said, however, he now has a large team of people working on the issue, and once they get all the cash the hospital is owed, it will be “enough to keep the hospital operating comfortably going forward.”
But state Rep. La Shawn Ford, who also spoke at the news conference, expressed doubts.
“What I want more than anything else is to have a plan to save this hospital,” Ford said. He said, however, “I’m not confident yet” that the hospital will reopen by this summer.
“I think we have a lot of work to do to open this hospital,” Ford said, noting that he thinks a cash infusion would be necessary to reopen.
“If I had to leave today and someone called me, a patient, saying they are looking forward to the hospital opening in June or July, I would say Dr. Prasad hasn’t made the case that he can do it,” Ford said, standing next to Prasad. “I think he has a drive to do it but I don’t think he has a clear guarantee to open the hospital by July.”
West Suburban’s sudden closure last week surprised many patients and families. The hospital shuttered its emergency department on Wednesday, and then worked to transfer its inpatients to other hospitals by the end of the day Friday.
The hospital’s closure has meant many workers are out of a job, patients are having to find other options for care, and nearby hospitals, including Rush Oak Park Hospital and Loretto Hospital, may face heavier patient loads. As part of the hospital’s closure, more than 500 workers have been furloughed, Prasad said.
Late last week, another part owner of the hospital, Reddy Rathnaker Patlola, and the head of Insight Hospital & Medical Center in Chicago said they were in discussions about whether Insight could temporarily take over the operations and management of West Suburban, allowing it to reopen.
Patlola owns the property the hospital sits on, and is a minority partner in Resilience Healthcare, which operates West Suburban. Prasad is the majority owner of Resilience.
A spokesperson for Patlola told the Tribune Tuesday evening that those “preliminary discussions continue” but there is no specific plan at the moment. The state would also have to weigh in on any potential involvement by Insight, the spokesperson said. In 2021, Insight Chicago paid $1 to buy Bronzeville’s Mercy Hospital, which was otherwise slated to close, and then renamed it to Insight Hospital & Medical Center.
Prasad, however, bristled at the idea of a takeover by Insight during the news conference Wednesday.
“Somebody else coming and managing (the hospital) is not the answer,” Prasad said. He said, “My landlord has absolutely no authority to be talking about operations to anybody.”
West Suburban has long been in financial trouble. Among its financial woes, West Suburban owes the state more than $50 million in unpaid taxes, according to the Illinois Department of Healthcare and Family Services.
In Illinois, hospitals must pay a hospital assessment tax, which is collected by the Illinois Department of Healthcare and Family Services. The state uses that money to draw down additional federal matching dollars. Those combined funds are then distributed to hospitals in Illinois based on the number of services they provide to people on Medicaid in a given time frame.
West Suburban agreed to start paying current taxes in September and to start making payments toward its back taxes in January, but did not do either, department spokesperson Melissa Kula said in an email.
Because West Suburban breached its agreement with the department, the department started recouping money from the hospital in December, Kula said. Even after those recoupments, West Suburban continued to receive Medicaid dollars and about $130,000 in monthly state-directed payments, Kula said.
Prasad said Wednesday he prioritized the hospital’s few available dollars for care, rather than taxes.
“Paying the bed tax is definitely very low down in our priority list,” Prasad said. “I’d rather provide service than be paying this tax.”
Prasad noted that West Suburban had been losing money for years, dating back to before he bought the hospital. Prasad bought West Suburban — along with Weiss Memorial Hospital in Uptown — several years ago from Pipeline Health. He said his company reduced financial waste, bought new medical equipment and was close to breaking even on the hospitals in 2023 and 2024 before the billing problems began. Resilience was the only entity that stepped forward to buy the hospitals at the time, Prasad said.
In August of last year, however, Weiss closed after it was terminated from the federal Medicare program, following failures of its air conditioning system. Prasad has appealed the federal government’s decision to bar Weiss from receiving Medicare dollars, and he said that appeal is still underway. “I don’t intend to abandon it,” he said.
Ford said Wednesday that as he’s talked to state leaders about the situation at West Suburban, “there’s concern about the current leadership.”
He said he thinks the community should be involved in helping to decide the hospital’s future.
“I’m grateful that Dr. Prasad has said he’s going to have community meetings and he’s going to gain the trust … if he’s not the choice of the community, I’ll ask that he steps aside so that we get someone that is going to have the confidence of the community to reopen this hospital,” Ford said.
After the news conference, Dr. Chidinma Osineme, medical staff president at the hospital, said it’s “tragic” that the hospital is now closed. Osineme said she was told by Prasad that she could not participate in the news conference. Prasad told reporters that was because the news conference was for the press.
“It’s been a slow unraveling,” Osineme said of the hospital’s demise. She said medical staff want a seat at the table in deciding how the hospital can move forward. “We want to be able to continue to serve our patients, and right now we have not been able to do so.”
