There’s good news and bad news this week out of the beleaguered West Suburban Medical Center.
First the good news: The phones have been turned back on after several days when callers to West Sub’s main number were told, “The number you have reached is not in service.”
The bad news is that the amount of money West Sub and its owners at Resilience Healthcare owe the state of Illinois has now ballooned to $71 million. And the state has begun to claw back a small portion — $2.6 million so far — of that amount by siphoning off some funding that would otherwise go to the hospital.
Manoj Prasad, CEO of Resilience, told Growing Community Media last week in an email exchange that West Sub has chosen not to make any payments to the state government. Instead, he said, the hospital will “provide care to the community instead of pay assessments to the state.”
Sounds almost high-minded. Prasad said West Sub is not alone among safety-net hospitals in Illinois that are not paying their debt or the growing interest on that debt. There is no doubt a range of challenges facing these critical institutions, and many of them came at the hands of the Trump administrations and its squeeze on Medicaid and Medicare funding.
However, the state offered West Sub a payment plan last October, which started at just $50,000 per month and has been ignored by West Sub.
That’s not good faith. Or it is an indication that a hospital that can’t keep its phones on also doesn’t have $50,000 in cash flow to pay back taxpayers.
Inspectors for the Illinois Department of Public Health were at West Sub two weeks ago for multiple days. When asked by GCM the results of that inspection, the department said it was a “pending matter” and would not comment. Prasad said it was routine, that IDPH was in the neighborhood inspecting other hospitals.
“We were pleased with their approval of our care delivery and operations that they reviewed at length,” Prasad said.
Time will tell.
