Members of the Delaware County Legislative Delegation issued the following statement on Thursday’s announcement by Prospect Medical Holdings about the closure of Crozer Health System.
Prospect Medical Holdings’ reckless and devastating decision to shut down Crozer Medical Health System is a brazen attack on healthcare access in Southeast Pennsylvania. This isn’t just about stripping away 400 hospital beds, denying 25,000 hospital admissions, and abandoning over 75,000 emergency room patients in Delaware County—it’s a full-blown crisis that endangers emergency services along the I-95 corridor, guts maternal healthcare, and piles even more pressure onto already overburdened hospitals.
This week, Prospect Medical Holdings’ board of directors voted to close Crozer Health after state and local officials, regional health systems, and philanthropic partners exhausted every possible option and financial resource to salvage the hospital system. Despite the recent $20 million lifeline extended by Delaware County and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, there is no external healthcare entity or group of entities capable of absorbing the crushing debt, staggering liabilities, and operating deficit that Prospect recklessly drove Crozer into. At a time when hospitals across the country are already struggling to stay afloat due to below-cost reimbursement from Medicare and Medicaid, bailing out Crozer became an impossible task—not because the will wasn’t there, but because Prospect and its former private equity owners ran it into the ground and selfishly pocketed the proceeds of the sale of Crozer properties instead of reinvesting in community health.
Crozer has been around since the Civil War, was one of the largest employers in Delaware County, and served as a place of healing and hope for generations. Now, because of financial mismanagement, it is no longer. We are furious for the thousands of nurses, doctors, and staff who stayed with Crozer for the sake of their patients, only for their sacrifices to be made in vain. We are heartbroken for the people in our community who depended on Crozer for emergency and routine medical care and now have nowhere to turn.
Last session, the Pennsylvania House of Representatives took decisive action, passing legislation to prevent exactly this kind of corporate sabotage. Private equity’s decimation of Crozer is an abomination. What these corporate raiders did to our hospitals should be criminal. Prospect lined its pockets while tearing apart a vital healthcare institution and must be held accountable. The healthcare system in America is fundamentally broken, and Crozer’s destruction is just the latest tragic example of that failure. As Crozer’s collapse proves, privatization and for-profit healthcare are not the solution—they are the problem.