Weiss Memorial Hospital, the Uptown based Chicago hospital which shares ownership with West Suburban Hospital, has lost its critical financial reimbursement pact with the federal Medicare program effective Aug. 9.
A copy of the notice from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services was obtained Friday by Austin Weekly News and Wednesday Journal. The authenticity of the termination by Medicare was confirmed by a spokesperson for the Illinois Department of Public Health.
Medicare reimbursement currently provides a majority of the revenue at Weiss Memorial. Weiss, like West Suburban, is designated as a safety net hospital. That means it treats fewer patients with private insurance and more people with Medicaid or no insurance.
The statement from IDPH said the agency has been closely monitoring conditions at Weiss and that by law it must report those findings to federal health agencies. The state health department said it was the federal agency which determined that Medicare reimbursement would be ended.
In the notice from the federal department, Medicare said that Weiss was not in compliance with Medicare standards in nursing services, physical environment and emergency services. “The agreement … as a hospital in the Medicare program, will be terminated,” read the notice from Medicare’s Chicago survey and operations group.
The IDPH statement said there is “a process for reconsideration that Weiss can pursue.” Asked for details about that process, the IDPH spokesperson told the Weekly and the Journal that it could share no information beyond its original statement.
Weiss has been much in the news over the past month as the hospital, owned by Resilience Healthcare, acknowledged it had suffered a “catastrophic” failure of its cooling systems just as Chicago entered an extended heatwave.
Patients already admitted to Weiss were quickly transferred to other hospitals. Nearly two dozen Weiss patients were transported to West Sub, its sibling hospital in Oak Park. But while the hospital initially claimed that West Sub had fully replaced its HVAC system in 2024, reporting from Block Club Chicago and the Sun-Times quickly made clear that West Sub also was having significant failures of its cooling system.
A subsequent FOIA inquiry by Wednesday Journal to the village of Oak Park found no evidence that Resilience had pulled any permits from the village for any HVAC project last year.
Emails sent to Dr. Manoj Prasad, CEO of Resilience Healthcare, were not returned on Friday evening.
