Predictably, Weiss Memorial Hospital, which has served the diverse and vulnerable populations of the northside Chicago neighborhood of Uptown for decades, closed its doors on August 8, 2025. Weiss Memorial Hospital was the first (and only) community safety-net hospital (a hospital whose stated mission is to serve low-income communities) in this neighborhood. The hospital closed despite impassioned pleas by several residents such as Phong Nguyen, a Vietnamese refugee and war veteran who has lived in Uptown and used Weiss Memorial for 50 years. As he told WBEZ, “I am over 80 years old this year. Not just my generation, but generations following myself still rely on this hospital for critical services; [Weiss is] a hospital that allows us to stay in the area and maintain the quality of life that we deserve.”

Weiss Memorial Hospital is the latest victim of disinvestment from public funding in safety-net hospitals. That process that has only been exacerbated by the national defunding of Medicare and Medicaid currently underway through the massive budget bill passed by Congress this year, leaving hundreds of hospitals in a state of precarity. That such safety-net hospitals are often disproportionately located in low-income communities and neighborhoods of color only furthers the crisis of health care, especially for vulnerable low-income, immigrant, and refugee populations who often lose access to care as a result.

Between 2010 and 2023, more hospitals closed than opened in the United States, with rural closures outpacing their urban counterparts. More than 300 rural hospitals across the country are in imminent danger of closure, with 400 others — an astounding one-third of all rural hospitals — at high risk of closing in the near future. The upcoming cuts to Medicaid funding will only heighten this health care crisis. But these cuts are only the latest form of disinvestment in community safety-net hospitals in both rural and urban areas.

Privatization of hospitals (and other public resources) has been one of the ways this process has manifested ever since the rise of free-market fundamentalist policies in the 1980s. Back then, a number of public hospitals were converted to private ownership and continue to be run as for-profit entities to this day. In recent years, these hospitals are increasingly operated by private equity firms. As of 2025, the American Hospital Association estimates that approximately 1,214 — or almost one-quarter of the 5,112 community hospitals in the U.S. — are owned by a for-profit entity, of which an estimated 460 (as of 2022 data) are owned by private equity firms, a 25-fold increase over the last two decades. The nonprofit watchdog Private Equity Stakeholder Project (PESP) reports in 2025 that almost 9 percent of private hospitals and nearly 23 percent of for-profit hospitals are owned by a few private equity firms. Given their overarching focus on maximizing profits and the lack of transparency in their decision-making processes, private for-profit ownership of hospitals has been associated with diminished quality of care, increased costs for patients, and eventually, bankruptcies and hospital closures. Private equity ownership of hospitals and health care has been described as “capitalism on steroids” by John McDonough, a Harvard University public health professor. As McDonough elaborates, private equity firms “seek returns on their investment as high as possible as quickly as possible, then rush to sell off that investment and go on to their next conquest.”

This pattern was evident in the well-documented 2024 bankruptcy and collapse of Steward Health Care, which at one point owned more than 30 hospitals across eight U.S. states. While Illinois was not one of these states, neither the state nor its largest city, Chicago, has been immune to this growing corporatization of health care in the U.S.

In Chicago alone, a number of public and not-for-profit hospitals were either closed outright or converted to for-profit and private equity-owned hospitals after the early 1980s. Many have shuttered their doors since then. In 1987, Provident Hospital, the first Black-run public hospital in Chicago, closed, followed by a not-for-profit community hospital, Hospital of Englewood in 1988. In 2000, Doctors Hospital of Hyde Park closed and in 2008, it was the turn of the Michael Reese Hospital. The 170-year-old Mercy Hospital, the oldest chartered not-for-profit hospital in Chicago, would have closed in 2021 were it not for the advocacy of community organizers representing the Chicago Health Equity Coalition. Their active intervention led a state review board to reject proposals for its closure and agree to the sale of the hospital to another entity, Insight Chicago, a not-for-profit hospital system.

This pattern — of disinvestment, precarity, and eventual closure — is particularly evident in hospitals that have been taken over by private equity firms. Recent examples include Westlake Hospital, which was closed by the private equity-backed hospital chain, Pipeline Health, in 2019 (it was reopened in 2021, but only after Pipeline was sued by the Village of Melrose Park). Other examples are the two Chicago hospitals that belonged to the Kindred Hospitals group. These two hospitals were run by ScionHealth, a health care system which in turn is owned by a private equity firm Apollo Global Management. Kindred Hospital Lakeshore in Chicago and Kindred Hospital Sycamore closed their doors in 2025. The closure of Weiss Memorial Hospital in Uptown Chicago is just the latest chapter in this sordid story of private equity-backed hospital closures.

Weiss Memorial Hospital was built through the largesse of Louis A. Weiss, a local businessman who bequeathed a large sum upon his death in 1949, with the stipulation that it serve the residents of Chicago’s northside, where he flourished. The Weiss family worked in partnership with the Strauss Surgical Group to co-found the hospital, which officially opened in 1953. Weiss Memorial Hospital was the first nonprofit community hospital to be built in Chicago in 25 years at that point. Following its mission to provide accessible health care to diverse and vulnerable communities, Weiss Memorial Hospital continued to innovate and serve the residents of Uptown, a neighborhood that had long served as a portal for displaced immigrants who were often intentionally segregated. In 1987, the hospital became affiliated with the University of Chicago Hospitals and Health System (UCHHS), giving Weiss’s patients access to many UCHHS clinical programs.

In 2002, however, UCHHS partnered with Vanguard Health Systems to acquire Weiss Memorial Hospital in a 20/80 partnership, with Vanguard being the majority stakeholder. While this partnership allowed Weiss to expand its emergency and intensive care units and acquire new infrastructure and technology, especially in the field of cancer treatment, it signaled the pathway for the hospital’s eventual demise. In 2013, Weiss was acquired by Tenet Healthcare Corporation, which promptly sold Weiss Memorial Hospital (along with Westlake Hospital and West Suburban Medical Center) to Pipeline Health in 2019. As noted, Pipeline Health, based out of California, is another private equity-backed hospital chain. Incidentally, Pipeline Health was the subject of a PESP report which outlined the extractive financial strategies that have led to the precarity and destabilization of hospitals such as Westlake and West Suburban in Chicago.

Pipeline Health ended up closing Westlake Hospital and selling West Suburban and Weiss Memorial to another private equity firm, Resilience Healthcare, the current owner of these hospitals. As the PESP report documents, the sale of the Weiss and West Suburban hospitals to Resilience Healthcare was structured in a way that split the operations and the land: Resilience Healthcare purchased the operations for $1 and the real estate was sold for $92 million to an affiliated but separate company, Ramco Healthcare Holdings, LLC, in 2022. Resilience Healthcare subsequently closed Weiss on August 8, 2025, and West Suburban Medical Center is in imminent danger of closure.

In short, the story of Weiss Memorial Hospital is a classic illustration of the corporatization of health care and the disadvantages of private equity acquisition of hospitals — always to the detriment of the public, especially vulnerable poor and communities of color. As Lilly Le, a community organizer from the Vietnamese Association of Illinois reiterated to NBC Chicago, the closure of Weiss is “part of a longstanding pattern of disinvestment” in communities like Uptown.

In 2021, community residents and activists, including the authors of this article, sounded the alarm when Weiss’s former owner, Pipeline Health, sold the Weiss Memorial Hospital parking lot to Lincoln Property Company, a real estate company, to build luxury housing. The rezoning and eventual sale of this land occurred despite vociferous protests, including an encampment by the community and opposition that included the zoning advisory board of the ward where the land is located. As community activists predicted — presciently, as it turned out — the sale of the parking lot, although it pre-dated the ownership of the hospital by Resilience Healthcare, was merely the first step in the eventual dismantling and closure of the hospital.

After taking over Weiss, Dr. Manoj Prasad, the CEO of Resilience Healthcare, said in 2023: “I’m of the belief that there should be no hospital in our country getting shut down because of financial reasons … I have no intentions of going anywhere … These two hospitals [Weiss Memorial and West Suburban], they will flourish.” He repeated this sentiment at a press conference on the day he closed Weiss. But clearly, the writing was already on the wall when the parking lot was sold in 2021.

Over the last several months, Resilience Healthcare has come under fire for repeated instances of managerial failure. In June, the hospital’s air conditioning failed, forcing administrators to transfer patients and halt medical procedures. “This is a 73-year-old building and many of our previous owners decided to kick the can down the road,” Prasad said during a press conference at the time. “A lot of upgrades that should have happened to our HVAC system, unfortunately did not happen.” Soon after, state investigators found that the hospital had created a makeshift emergency department in an office building without proper equipment. Prasad attempted to justify this by saying that the findings were untrue, that the makeshift department was properly equipped, and that he received approval from the health department to relocate the department.

Even prior to these failures, the hospital’s physical environment had already been a concern for the Illinois Department of Public Health following a series of inspections between November 2024 to July 2025. These inspections resulted in the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) ultimately issuing a notice that it would end Medicare payments to Weiss Hospital effective August 9, citing non-compliance in multiple areas: nursing services, physical environment, and emergency services. Resilience Healthcare was informed about the deadline on June 4 following multiple inspections from the Illinois Department of Public Health and had ample time to make the necessary infrastructural improvements, or work with local elected officials to buy needed time. The company instead closed the hospital effective August 8, one day ahead of the CMS deadline. As 46th Ward Alderwoman Angela Clay noted, “This closure is not just a health care crisis — it is the result of avoidable mismanagement and yet another example of how private equity firms profit off the backs of working-class communities, even at the expense of their health and well-being.”

To address the most pressing need — to keep the hospital open and allow it to serve vulnerable populations — local alderpersons and state lawmakers serving this neighborhood signed a letter calling on CMS for an eight-week extension of Medicare funding for the hospital. To be sure, while this might be an important first step given the urgency of keeping the hospital accessible to patients, reopening Weiss under the same management and leaving intact the ownership by Resilience Healthcare, a private equity firm, may not be the best long-term solution.

So, where do we go from here? Following the community organizing and legal pathways opened by the Chicago communities impacted by the Westlake Hospital closure and the near-closure of Mercy Hospital (thanks to the #SaveMercy campaign by the Chicago Health Equity Coalition) is one immediate option. Another more long-term option is to turn Weiss Memorial Hospital into a public hospital under the umbrella of a nonprofit entity or Cook County’s hospital system — a proposal supported by community organizers who took part in the earlier campaign to stop the building of luxury developments on the hospital’s parking lot.

If there is one lesson to be learned from the story of the private equity acquisition of hospitals, it is that there is a fundamental contradiction at the heart of this endeavor: While communities expect these entities to prioritize their interests over profits, as corporate entities, private equity firms are set up to prioritize profits. Invariably, the path of private equity ownership seems to end with hospital precarity or closure. If the vulnerable populations served by a safety-net hospital such as Weiss are to be served, why not circumvent this process and convert hospitals such as Weiss to public hospitals operated by the county, or at least by a nonprofit entity such as a university?

In short, make Weiss Memorial Hospital a people’s hospital. Otherwise, we will just continue to witness more disinvestment in safety-net and community hospitals, and more hospital closures. As Marc Kaplan, an organizer for Northside Action for Justice, one of the core members of the coalition to save Weiss along with ONE Northside and the Vietnamese Association of Illinois, warned, “This is really the canary in the coal mine, so to speak. [Such closures] are going to happen to hospitals all around the city and the country … This is a real disaster we’re looking at here.”

We have a chance to avert such disasters by planning long-term. Let’s take that chance.