An urban hospital on the brink vs. the officials sworn to save it
Illinois and Chicago officials are trying to figure out how to stop a private company from closing a money-losing urban hospital in a poor, underserved Chicago neighborhood.
Trinity Health, a national Catholic tax-exempt chain, wants to close Mercy Hospital and Medical Center on Chicago s Near South Side by May 31. Last month, in an unusual move, the Illinois Health Facilities & Services Review Board unanimously denied Trinity permission to close the 412-bed facility, which predominantly serves Black and other minority patients on Medicaid.
The board members said they feared the closure would limit access to care for nearly 60,000 South Side residents, forcing them to travel nearly 7 miles to the closest facility with an emergency room, intensive care unit and birthing center. It also would cost the community about 2,000 hospital jobs.
December 18, 2020 05:15 AM
Pfizer vaccine supply in flux • Can the state really stop Mercy Hospital from closing? • FDA clears Abbott s at-home COVID test
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Bloomberg
SO, HOW MANY VACCINE DOSES ARE STATES GETTING? The mystery of why tens of thousands of promised COVID-19 vaccine doses won’t be coming to Illinois as scheduled over the next few weeks deepened as states around the country began to complain of the same thing, Greg Hinz reports.
Gov. J.B. Pritzker said Wednesday that federal Operation Warp Speed officials who control distribution of the Pfizer vaccine had informed the state without explanation that its allotment for the next two weeks would be cut “roughly in half.”