Politicians and staff of MetroSouth Medical Center are urging state regulators to postpone a vote scheduled for later this month that will decide the fate of the Blue Island hospital.
They are accusing MetroSouth’s owner, Quorum Health, of misleading the Illinois Health Facilities and Services Review Board when it filed a petition in June seeking approval to close the facility.
The hospital said it hoped to close by the end of the year, then MetroSouth CEO John Walsh informed employees the facility planned to shut down by Sept. 30 — weeks before the board had a chance to take a vote.
The board is expected to decide the facility’s future on Sept. 17.
“They originally said they were going to close this hospital at the end of the year unless a potential buyer could come take this hospital over,” said state Rep. Bob Rita, D-Blue Island. “I’m aware that there’s a couple of potential people that are interested in this hospital, but Quorum won’t meet with them. Quorum won’t negotiate with them,”
Rita said he believes the decision to close the hospital Sept. 30 is about MetroSouth’s parent company’s financial quarterly reports.
“It has to do with the profit over patients and people, we are witnessing corporate greed,” Rita said.
Rita demanded the review board delay the closure of the hospital and force MetroSouth owners to renegotiate with potential buyers. He said he’s been fielding calls from interested buyers.
A willing buyer recently said Quorum has refused to negotiate a sale.
Quorum’s spokesperson Amanda Anderson confirmed negotiations with the willing buyer, People’s Choice Hospital and MSMC Management, fell through because of the buyer’s unwillingness “to engage in customary negotiations or sign a binding agreement, combined with documented concerns of alleged fraud and mismanagement.”
“We felt the negotiations were no longer productive or in the best interest of MetroSouth Medical Center and the community,” she said.
Quorum was offering the hospital and its equipment at no cost to MSMC Management, Anderson said, but MSMC Management refused to commit to a $750,000 deposit that didn’t have a “walk away” contingency. This ultimately forced Quorum to walk away.
Quorum wrote a letter to the board in late August saying it has done its best to “viably” run the hospital, but decreasing governmental reimbursements and the rise of outpatient health facilities has forced the closure.
If MetroSouth isn’t shut down by the end of the third quarter it will jeopardize the sustainability of Quorum’s seven other hospitals in the state and the 19 hospitals scattered across the country, according to the letter.
Blue Island Mayor Domingo Vargas said the closure will have dire implications for the south suburbs.
“Fifty-thousand patients [every year] have used that ER room. Where are they going to go?” Vargas said.
“They’ll be dead” before they can get to Ingalls Memorial Hospital in Harvey, Vargas said. And Roseland Community Hospital won’t be properly staffed to handle the increase in patients, he said.
“It is true that there has been buyer number one, there is a buyer number two but [Quorum] doesn’t want to meet us at the table,” Vargas said
Manny Ramos is a corps member of Report for America, a not-for-profit journalism program that aims to bolster Sun-Times coverage of Chicago’s South Side and West Side.
