State Should Help Reopen Uptown’s Weiss Hospital, Neighbors Say: ‘We Need Affordable Healthcare’

UPTOWN — Neighbors and community groups are demanding state officials step up to help reopen two shuttered safety-net hospitals in the Chicago area.

The Coalitions to Save Weiss and West Suburban Hospitals are calling for assistance from Gov. JB Pritzker and the state to open the doors of Uptown’s Weiss Memorial Hospital, 4646 N. Marine Drive, and West Suburban Hospital in Oak Park. The two hospitals are both owned and operated by Resilience Healthcare.

Weiss has been closed for nearly a year after the hospital was cut from the Medicaid and Medicare programs for being out of compliance on care standards, Block Club previously reported. West Suburban Hospital abruptly closed in March.

The closure of these hospitals has left thousands of residents — many of them immigrants, seniors or low-income — without an emergency room or hospital close to where they live, advocates said during a press conference Tuesday.

“The state is responsible for overseeing public services such as hospitals, so we are calling on the governor to treat this like the public health emergency that it is,” said Lilly Le, the community organizing director for the Vietnamese Association of Illinois.

Many seniors in Uptown, which has a large population of Vietnamese immigrants, were longtime patients of Weiss, Le said. The loss of the hospital’s services mean they have to travel longer distances if they’re having a health emergency or need other care.

“A lot of folks were very confused about where they should go,” Le said. “The transfer process was very unclear, there was lack of communication from the management and the influx is adding additional pressure to the healthcare system overall.”

Phong Nguyen, an 81-year-old Uptown resident and former Weiss patient, said the state should be working with the community to find a path toward reopening the hospital as soon as possible.

“Many of my neighbors are also low-income immigrants and elders who live near Weiss and can only walk or take public transit to the hospital,” Nguyen said in Vietnamese, which was translated into English by Le. “We need Weiss. We need affordable healthcare.”

A spokesperson for JB Pritzker said the state offered financial and other support to the hospitals but that it wasn’t enough to sustain their operations under current ownership.

“Despite intensive financial and operational support from the State of Illinois throughout Resilience Health’s tenure, West Suburban and Weiss Hospitals are ultimately private facilities whose leadership was both unable and unwilling to do everything in their power necessary to keep their facilities in operation — and they never presented the State with any formal request or viable plan to continue operations,” the spokesperson said.

Weiss shuttered in August 2025 after federal health officials found it was not in compliance in three areas: nursing services, physical environment and emergency services. Its removal from the federal health insurance programs came a month after Weiss’ air conditioning failed, causing the hospital to refuse new patients and send existing patients to other medical facilities.

West Suburban closed earlier this year due to what hospital executives said was a problematic new billing system that resulted in cashflow issues. But hospital workers told Block Club the facility suffered from chronic mismanagement that led to inadequate care and dangerous conditions for some patients.

The possibility of these two hospital reopening under their current ownership remains unclear.

There has been an ongoing legal battle in Cook County Circuit Court between the two owners of Resilience Healthcare: Dr. Manoj Prasad, the CEO and majority owner of Resilience Healthcare, and Reddy Rathnaker Patlola, who owns 40 percent of Resilience and owns the properties where Weiss and West Suburban hospitals reside.

The two owners sued each other in April following the closure of West Suburban Hospital, with Patlola trying to take control of the hospitals away from Prasad, the Chicago Sun-Times reported. They were both due in court for a hearing Tuesday afternoon.

The Illinois Health Facilities and Services Review Board last week granted Prasad another six months to resolve outstanding compliance issues and unpaid debts to the state before Weiss risks losing its license to operate, according to ABC7.

Prasad has been the subject of much criticism over alleged cost-cutting and other management measures since 2022, when Resilience acquired the troubled West Suburban and Weiss hospitals for $92 million.

Prasad couldn’t immediately be reached for comment.