Crozer Chester Medical Center (Credit: Crozer Health Facebook) Photographer: Laurence Kesterson http://www.lkesterson.com
As someone born and raised in Havertown, Delaware County, and now working across Pennsylvania in hospital and post-acute care, the permanent closure of Crozer-Chester Medical Center and Taylor Hospital feels personal.
After years of will-they-or-won’t-they sale rumors and more recent efforts to keep the lights on, the hospitals shut their doors on May 2, marking the end of two vital institutions in Delaware County.
Crozer wasn’t just a hospital. It was the safety net for the community’s medical and behavioral health, serving as a vital trauma center, home to one of the region's few burn units, and the first stop for tens of thousands of patients needing emergency and primary care each year.
With these closures, more than 75,000 annual ER visits will now be redirected to already strained hospitals in surrounding counties.
This isn’t a ripple. It's a crater. And it’s Delco’s most vulnerable seniors, low-income families, patients with chronic illness, and those without reliable transportation who will suffer the most.
On paper, there are other hospitals in the region, but practical and logistical barriers will make access to care a massive challenge.
Chester and Ridley Park, former homes of Crozer and Taylor, are some of the most underserved communities in Pennsylvania. Residents have now lost easy and direct access to trauma care, emergency services, and essential inpatient treatment.
Ambulance diversions have been in place, and emergency response times are increasing throughout neighboring hospitals in the suburbs and Main Line. For trauma, stroke, cardiac arrest—minutes matter. And now, they’ll be spent on the road.
Governor Josh Shapiro recently called the Crozer closures a healthcare crisis created by “corporate raiders,” emphasizing that “Private equity raided Crozer, lined their pockets, and gutted the system.”
Across Pennsylvania, private equity has stripped money out of our hospitals and health care systems with total disregard for the communities that rely on them.
What happened here at Crozer-Chester Medical Center is just the latest example.
It’s unacceptable — and it’s time we… pic.twitter.com/siRRA5SW0I
His comments weren’t just political. They captured what many in the healthcare industry already knew: Crozer’s collapse wasn’t a surprising or sudden accident. It was a slow, painful unraveling.
Crozer’s shutdown reflects a growing national trend. Hospitals under immense financial pressure, particularly in underserved communities, are closing their doors at an accelerating pace.
At least 16 hospitals and emergency departments have already closed in 2025. Four of them shut down in just two days this April, including Crozer Health. Since 2010, more than 153 rural hospitals have shuttered and over 600 more are considered at risk.
Unfortunately, Crozer’s closure doesn’t end the sad story. History tells us this will create continued and lasting damage for the region.
After Hahnemann University Hospital closed in Philadelphia in 2019, nearby hospitals saw massive increases in ER wait times and patient overflow. Rural and suburban hospital closures in states like Georgia and Texas have been linked to higher mortality rates for time-sensitive conditions like heart attacks.
Research shows when a hospital closes, the average distance to the next available hospital is more than 20 miles. For time-sensitive emergencies, like heart attacks or strokes, that additional transportation time contributes to an 8.7% increase in inpatient mortality. Further, once a hospital is gone, the infrastructure and trust take years, if ever, to rebuild.
The cost isn’t only measured in those who have lost reliable access to care. It’s measured in the countless area residents who lost their livelihood overnight. Delaware County now faces the direct loss of nearly 3,000 Crozer employees across clinical, administrative, and support roles. It’s hard to estimate how many more jobs will be impacted indirectly.
Of course, there’s the deeper issue: the increasingly fragile balance between patients and profit in hospital medicine.
Hospital executives and boards face relentless pressure to deliver more services with fewer resources, maintain 24/7 clinical coverage, and manage rising acuity, all while absorbing shrinking reimbursements, an increasingly underinsured population, and escalating labor costs. For many institutions serving vulnerable communities like Chester, it’s nearly impossible to make the math work.
So how did we get here and what went wrong?
Prospect Medical Holdings reported over $400 million in debt between Crozer-Chester and Taylor Hospital and was unable to find a buyer. Even with emergency funds from local, state, and charitable partners, the final gap remained unbridgeable.
And while Prospect says they were willing to hand over Crozer to a new operator “for no cash payment,” state officials were left scrambling to protect services as the doors closed anyway.
When you combine mounting debt, a payer mix heavily skewed by uninsured and underinsured, and stagnating reimbursement rates, the devastating outcome can at least be understood within a broken system.
We can acknowledge these pressures without accepting a tragic end as inevitable. Without structural safeguards and meaningful reforms, hospitals like Crozer will continue to vanish. And when they do, it’s patients, staff, and entire communities who bear the cost.
Pennsylvania politicians, media and social platforms have erupted in outrage, directing intense criticism at Prospect Medical Holdings. And while there is plenty to criticize in how they operated Crozer and handled the abrupt closure, we must resist reducing this conversation to the simplistic “for-profit healthcare is evil.”
I’ve spent much of my career in for-profit healthcare, where strong leadership, patient-first values, and financial discipline can and do coexist. It’s not the business model that failed. It’s the lack of oversight when leadership strays from its mission and responsibilities.
There must be accountability for decisions that destabilize communities, but we also need systems that prevent entire hospitals from disappearing overnight.
My family lives in Delaware County and has received care at Crozer hospitals. I’ve worked with patients discharging from Crozer who need additional rehabilitation services. I saw up close the complexity of providing rehab and long-term care in a community facing real socioeconomic hardship.
Home health / hospice occupational therapist in Crozer Health system says she is one of 90 people given lay-off notices, says people “will die” without them and other critical care services. @CBSPhiladelphia pic.twitter.com/1TbuEHbXNY
Discharging patients safely back to the community was never just about medical recovery. It was about finding transportation, securing housing, coordinating with underfunded social services, and connecting people with primary care resources that were already stretched thin. Even then, it often felt like patchwork over policy.
Without Crozer, that already fragile healthcare and social service landscape becomes even more unstable for patients, families, and frontline healthcare workers alike.
This isn’t just about one hospital system. It needs to be a call to action.
We need smarter policies that protect essential infrastructure in medically underserved communities. We need emergency funding mechanisms for hospitals on the brink. We need healthcare leadership incentivized to prioritize long-term stability, not just short-term financial gains. And Delaware County needs a path to reopen these boarded-up medical buildings.
Delaware County deserved better. Our neighbors, our patients, our healthcare workers—they all did. We can’t undo what happened to Crozer, but we can push for safeguards that make sure the next underserved community doesn’t wake up to locked hospital doors and empty promises.
Unless we build the safeguards now, these stories won’t be the exception. They’ll be the future.
David Sucharski was born and raised in Havertown and began his healthcare career in Chester. Now based in Bucks County, he serves as a senior executive for an internal medicine practice that began in the Greater Philadelphia region and now delivers care nationwide across the healthcare continuum.
(Editor's note: The views represented in this letter belong to the author and may not be representative of Philly Daily, Delco Now, or the Access Network. The letter was slightly edited for style and grammar.)
