Ailing hospitals pose a health risk to us all.
St. Francis Hospital in Blue Island, Michael Reese on the city's Near South Side, and-as Mike Colias reports this week-St. Anthony's on the West Side need financial lifelines to survive. Each is a so-called safety-net hospital with large numbers of Medicaid recipients on its patient rolls.
Hospitals in wealthier areas, meanwhile, struggle to spend their enormous cash reserves and compete to build advanced facilities for the expensive surgical procedures their privately insured patients can afford. Few have done much to help their compatriots in poorer neighborhoods.
These luckier hospitals would do well to remember ...