Patients and staff have reported filthy rooms, broken supplies and a flooded ER at Community First in Portage Park despite the tens of millions in taxpayer grants sent to the for-profit safety-net hospital since the pandemic.
Manny Ramos | Aug. 27, 2025
PORTAGE PARK -- In December 2022, two weeks before Christmas, paramedics rushed a 27-year-old woman to Community First Medical Center after her family reported she was struggling to breathe.
It was L.G.'s second visit to the Portage Park hospital in three days. The first time she was there, she tested positive for the flu and was sent home, according to federal and county records.
Then her condition worsened. Desperate for help, her family called 911, prompting the trip back to the Community First emergency room.
No other patients were waiting when L.G. arrived, according to the federal and county records. Yet for the next 40 minutes, no hospital staff checked on L.G. as she sat in a wheelchair in the waiting room, her head falling backward, then forward, before her whole body slumped over, state investigators wrote after reviewing video.
Seeing her condition get worse, family members consoled the woman and on three occasions ran to the nurses' triage center, pleading for help.
When a nurse finally responded, it was too late.
L.G. was pronounced dead after being in the waiting area for almost an hour and 30 minutes, records show. A sudden heart condition caused the death, the Cook County Medical Examiner's Office concluded. But state investigators determined the hospital failed to medically screen L.G. to assess the severity of her condition.
L.G.'s sister, who was with her throughout the ordeal, said their family is not ready to talk about their trauma. Block Club is using L.G.'s initials rather than her name out of respect for the family's privacy.
Thousands of low-income patients from Chicago's Northwest and West sides rely on care from Community First Medical Center, a for-profit safety-net hospital. But while L.G.'s death may be an extreme, tragic case, the care she received is all too common, according to public records, photos and dozens of interviews by Block Club Chicago.
Doctors and nurses have tried to perform miracles when medical gloves, thermometers, saline flushes, and other essential supplies and equipment were scarce.
Staff and patients have also encountered sanitation concerns, discovering human feces and bodily fluids in regular waste bins near where patients were treated or fed.
Many patients and staff worry more lives could be at risk if Community First continues down this path.
Hospital leaders have downplayed or dismissed the stories of inadequate care. But they don't deny the hospital faces challenges, which they blame on a lack of state funding and slow Medicaid reimbursements. They also say the hospital took a financial hit during and after the pandemic.
Yet public records show the state and federal governments have infused Community First with at least $75 million in taxpayer-funded grants since 2020. Some government officials said they don't know how exactly the funds were used, while others wouldn't say whether they've checked.
What's clear is that the money hasn't improved patient experiences at the small Northwest Side hospital, which has some of the lowest patient rankings in the United States, according to federal data.
The number of patients served by Community First has shrunk in recent years, suggesting many people avoid the facility, perhaps fueling its downward spiral at a time the entire safety-net system is under attack from the Trump administration. Neighbors have nicknamed Community First "the Death Hospital," according to staff and patients who spoke with Block Club, including a former ER technician and Arely Ocampo, whose family has been treated there.
In some ways, what's happening at Community First is a snapshot of the financial problems faced by many other hospitals serving low-income and working-class communities.
Safety-net hospitals operate on tighter margins than other hospitals, said Vikas Saini, president of the Lown Institute, a nonprofit that evaluates hospitals across the country on equity, value and patient outcomes.
But Community First appears to be in deeper trouble than most, Saini said.
"If they don't have the money for IV fluid, you're talking about a serious mission critical problem," he said. "That's just not normal. Even [at] the most shoestring operation of safety nets, these are the basics to take care of people that are necessary.
"If I were in the community, I'd be alarmed."
The hospital's owners promised to do better when they bought it a decade ago.
In 2014, the struggling nonprofit facility, then known as Our Lady of the Resurrection Hospital, was on the verge of closing. That's when Ed Green, a health care bankruptcy lawyer, appeared before a state board and said he and his team were committed to saving it.
With the financial support of a private-equity firm, Green and his partner, Rick Muckelrath, created a for-profit company called Community First Medical Center to buy the ailing hospital.
"We're going to make all the capital commitments that we need for that hospital, what needs to be done. We're going to turn the hospital around," Green said, according to transcripts of the 2014 hearing.
Green added that he and his partners saw financial opportunity in the hospital, describing their takeover as a "long-term investment" that could take time to generate revenue. "Then you can liquidate and realize that value after it's the right thing to do five years, 10 years, 15 years from now."
Soon after, the Illinois Health Facilities and Services Review Board approved the sale.
Community First purchased the 296-bed hospital for $30 million. But not all of that money was paid upfront. While Green and his partners paid $10 million at the closing, they committed to putting the additional $20 million toward hospital improvements by 2019.
Though Green didn't respond to Block Club's questions, other hospital leaders said Community First's owners have gone well beyond that pledge, investing more than $26.5 million of their own money in IT software, hardware and server upgrades, imaging and surgery equipment, roof repairs and HVAC upgrades.
Under the new owners, the hospital built its revenues and, by 2017, reported a net income of $1.8 million, according to Medicare cost reports, filed annually with the federal and state governments.
But within a year, despite cutting expenses, Community First reported losing money again.
Public records don't show exactly why. Since the hospital is a private, for-profit business, it's not required to disclose many of its financial dealings, including details of expenditures and staff salaries. Hospital leaders wouldn't provide this information to Block Club.
Amid the secrecy, some hospital staff have questioned whether the owners made all the investments they claimed. And they said by the time the pandemic hit, hospital leaders had shown a willingness to take shortcuts.
The hospital's struggles go back years.
One former ER technician said his first day, in late 2019, was chaotic and overwhelming.
"It was definitely like being thrown into the lion's den because I had about four hours of training" before that first shift, he told Block Club, asking his name not be used to protect his licenses. "I believe it was about 18 beds in the main ER, which had plenty more patients than that, including in the hallways, and I was the only tech on my first day."
Conditions at the hospital got progressively worse after that day, he said. The hospital was often understaffed, forcing employees to take on an unsafe amount of work, he said.
The ER and other units operated with ratios of as many as eight patients for each nurse, according to shift assignment records and accounts from hospital employees. In Illinois, the average patient-to-nurse ratio was about five to one around that time, according to a 2021 study, which found that the dangers to patients increased when the ratios were higher.
The ER technician said he was asked regularly to administer "medication pushes" -- in which patients receive medication directly into the bloodstream through an IV -- even though he wasn't licensed to do so.
"I was sent to a different floor to start an IV on a patient's jugular vein, which I now understand ... would essentially be considered a surgical procedure," the ER technician said. "It has to be very precise, and the fact that I was expected to do it, in hindsight, is very concerning."
The technician eventually left the hospital and is now a firefighter.
In 2020, Norman Justiniano was in need of work when he heard Community First was looking for more custodians. He was happy to get hired.
But Justiniano quickly became alarmed.
Garbage was piled to the ceiling in disposal rooms on every floor. Worse, workers didn't always take precautions with medical waste, he said.
"I felt uncomfortable," Justiniano said. "The person who was training me was just picking up the trash and picking up red bags at the same time. Just mixing the garbage with these red bags and storing them in the same place. I didn't know much at the time, but I felt like that wasn't right."
Justiniano was concerned for good reason: The red bags are for biohazardous waste and need to be segregated into properly labeled, enclosed containers. Mixing these wastes can potentially spread infectious diseases, according to the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency.
But Justiniano said he saw biohazardous waste mishandled a number of times. Often, he would see liquid seeping out of red bags lying on the floor, he said. When that happened, he would have to mop up the small puddles with a disinfecting solvent, he said.
Sometimes, human feces or a container filled with bodily fluid were discarded in normal waste bins or left in the open on top of bins, according to photos reviewed by Block Club.
Often, workers would serve food and then place the food trays on top of closed biohazard bins, potentially contaminating the trays for the next patient, other photos show.
Justiniano said he regularly notified his supervisors that biowaste wasn't properly segregated and disposed of, but nothing changed -- except that his supervisors started to blame him, he said.
"Enough was enough, and I ended up quitting," Justiniano said.
The COVID-19 pandemic was a pivotal moment for health care across the United States, exposing the already-faltering system for low-income patients.
Community First leaders said it changed the makeup of their patients and led the hospital into financial peril.
In 2020, Community First became a safety-net hospital for the first time as it received an influx of Medicaid patients. By 2024, nearly 95 percent of Community First patients had government-sponsored insurance or no insurance, said Dr. Jared Marcucci, the hospital's chief executive officer and chief medical officer.
As with other safety-net hospitals, this meant Community First had to rely on delayed government reimbursements to pay for much of the care it provided.
At the same time, the emergency department and other inpatient units were overwhelmed with patients -- while other parts of Community First were empty during the pandemic, Marcucci said. For a couple months, vital revenue sources such as outpatient surgery were prohibited under one of the governor's executive orders, he said.
The pandemic pressures, along with skyrocketing supply costs, added up to financial trouble, Marcucci said.
By 2023, the hospital's annual revenues had fallen to $96.9 million, federal records show -- a 22 percent drop since 2017. Its operating expenses fell, too, but not at the same rate, causing its net losses to grow to nearly $7.4 million in 2023.
Marcucci and other hospital leaders would not provide additional financial records, including the salaries of Community First executives or owners.
During the pandemic, government regulators also cited Community First for operational failures -- and the union representing nurses at the hospital said those failures led to three deaths.
The three were all nurses who contracted COVID-19 while working at the hospital in 2020. Supervisor Anjanette Miller, 48, died in April of that year; Nancy Veto, 65, died in May; and Dione Malana, 61, died in July.
The National Nurses United union filed a complaint with the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration, alleging that hospital administrators neglected to fit-test employees for face masks and directed employees to reuse disposable gowns.
In December 2020, OSHA fined Community First nearly $13,500 for not fit-testing workers with facemasks or implementing a "written respiratory protection program" for them. Nearly five years later, the hospital is still contesting the violation and has not paid the fine, records show.
State officials placed Community First on a corrective action plan in 2021, after investigators found problems with how staff were restraining patients. Investigators also determined hospital beds were placed in areas without working electrical outlets.
Even as Community First has struggled, federal and state agencies have tried to shore it up with grants. The hospital received at least $75 million in taxpayer money on top of Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements between 2020 and 2025, records show.
Most of the grants were intended to help fill financial holes facing safety-net hospitals coming out of the pandemic:
Altogether, Community First received more of these grant funds over the past five years than almost every other safety-net hospital in Illinois. University of Chicago Medical Center, with $163.5 million, and Mount Sinai Hospital, with $77.2 million, got more. Both are nonprofits.
And Community First's total might be even higher. The Illinois Department of Public Health said it couldn't provide records showing how much was awarded to the hospital before 2023 through one initiative, the Safety Net Hospital Grant.
The hospital received the grant funds with little oversight. State and federal officials couldn't say how Community First spent the grant money.
Spokespeople for the Illinois Department of Public Health wouldn't say whether the agency has conducted an audit of the grants it sent to Community First.
The public health department "continues to monitor grant activities related to safety net hospitals," said Jim Leach, a department spokesperson. "We will continue, as we do every year, to perform a look back on budgets and approved expenditures."
Meanwhile, the Illinois Department of Health and Family Services said the hospital has failed to submit mandated reports despite multiple notices.
"As a result, [Health and Family Services] has not been able to conduct monitoring procedures related to their expenditures," Melissa Kula, a department spokesperson, said in a statement. "If Community First does not come into compliance with reporting requirements, [Health and Family Services] will ultimately be required to recoup the funds."
In addition, Community First received a COVID-era Paycheck Protection Program loan, intended to help small businesses. The hospital received the money even though, in a Medicare cost filing, it reported having more than 600 employees -- well above the eligibility requirements.
A spokesperson for the Small Business Administration said the agency doesn't comment on individual loan cases.
In their application for another state grant, hospital officials noted that they would use the funds to complete an on-site behavioral health treatment center. But in April, WGN reported that Community First failed to pay a construction firm $3 million to build the behavioral treatment unit.
The hospital has fallen behind on bills so often that it sometimes struggles to order supplies and pay for essential services, according to patient and staff interviews with Block Club.
For example, at several points in 2022 and 2023, Community First ran out of items like saline flushes -- a multi-purpose solution used to clean wounds and intravenous lines -- and health care workers were forced to make their own, according to two nurses and a former ER technician.
Brendan Morse saw these problems firsthand when paramedics rolled him into the emergency room at the end of 2023.
Suffering from back pain and body convulsions, the 35-year-old was strapped to a gurney when he was wheeled in. As he was lying uncomfortably for hours, Morse observed conditions that ranged from odd to troubling to chaotic, he said. A former emergency medical technician himself, Morse had worked in bustling hospitals before, but this was different.
Morse immediately noticed that parts of the hospital weren't clean. He saw dry droplets of blood on the floors, mold on the baseboards and dust all over the vital signs machine he was attached to.
Morse also saw staff struggling to work around supply shortages.
"There was a nurse running around just screaming that she couldn't find a pulse oximeter," a standard piece of equipment that measures blood oxygen levels, Morse said. "Even in my almost delirious state I was like, 'Boy, this is weird.'"
Morse stayed in the hospital overnight, then was brought back by ambulances on three other occasions as he battled effects of long COVID over the next few months. Morse grew concerned that poor maintenance created risks for patients and staff even when they were just trying to get around the hospital.
One night, a hospital worker was supposed to transport Morse from the ER to an admitting floor, but multiple elevators were out of order. When she finally found a working elevator, Morse's bed was pushed into what felt like a void.
"The lights didn't work, so I was transferred up to whatever floor I was [on] in an elevator that was pitch black," Morse said. "The nurse had to use her cellphone to read the buttons."
Since 2021, Community First's elevators have failed 15 city inspections, records show. Problems with the elevators have affected other patients, including one woman who said she was stranded in the elevator until staff pried open the doors in between floors.
When Morse last stayed at Community First in spring 2024, the air conditioning wasn't working, so staff set up a box fan that blew humid air in his room. He said nurses were using ice packs to cool down patients in worse condition than him. Then there were problems with the food.
"During one of my episodes, I had an injured tongue ... and they were giving me pain meds for it because it hurt," Morse said. "My tongue was swollen to about the size of a golf ball. I could not chew anything, but I kept being served with things like sandwiches. ... I kept being served things I couldn't eat."
Morse's experiences aren't isolated. Five current and former employees told Block Club it's not uncommon for the hospital to be short of food -- or run out altogether.
One nurse said she once had to run to a nearby grocery store to buy bread, cheese and sandwich meat to feed an entire emergency department filled with patients.
"One day, they only had eggs to give," said another former ER technician. "Even if you were allergic to eggs, you ate an egg. I'm not saying eggs with toast -- no, just eggs. I quit shortly after that. I couldn't do it anymore."
Beyond what Morse experienced, Community First has sometimes had a hard time keeping other equipment in service. By this year, the hospital had 17 inactive x-ray machines, far more than any other area hospital, according to the Illinois Emergency Management Agency.
Then there is the facility itself, which is in disrepair. The hospital's garage deteriorated so much that the city shut it down last summer, and it didn't reopen for more than a year. In January, a water pipe burst, flooding portions of the emergency room's ambulance bay.
Despite these problems, since 2020, the hospital has spent more than $140,000 donating to state political committees, including campaign funds for Illinois House Speaker Emanuel "Chris" Welch and Senate President Don Harmon, records show.
The reputation of the hospital has taken a hit in the communities it's supposed to serve. One resident who spoke with Block Club said she left a note on her refrigerator instructing potential paramedics not to take her to Community First in an emergency -- even if it means taking more time to drive elsewhere.
Others share her concerns. Patient satisfaction with Community First fell from 44 percent in 2019 to 33 percent in 2023, according to the most recent data available at Illinois Hospital Report Card. These figures fall well short of the state and national averages of 67 and 70 percent, respectively.
Between July 2023 and June 2024, only 33 percent of patients who were surveyed said they would "definitely recommend" the hospital to friends or family, according to data from the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. That's the eighth-worst score out of more than 4,600 hospitals surveyed across the country.
In 2013, when the hospital was still a nonprofit, it treated nearly 126,000 patients, according to reports collected by the Illinois Health and Facilities Services Review Board. By 2023, the most recent year available, Community First treated just 45,688 patients -- a 63 percent drop in a decade.
The decline in patients happened at the same time hospital revenues fell. Community First reported nearly $7.4 million in net losses in 2023.
Paula Smith, a manager and data scientist with the Lown Institute, reviewed Community First's Medicare cost reports for Block Club and said the hospital could enter a "financial death spiral where they cannot raise revenues because they do not have the staff or the hiring means to support increasing services."
Community First leaders told Block Club they are providing care to communities in need despite the difficult landscape for safety-net hospitals.
Last fall, chaplain Willie Cobb sat at a Logan Square cafe, upset over what he viewed as a negative portrayal of Community First. Cobb slammed his fist on a wobbling table while saying the hospital staff have saved countless people, including gunshot victims "clinging to life."
"I've seen them do that so many times and then there's nobody reporting on that," Cobb said. "They have worked their hearts and souls out."
Cobb stressed that the hospital provides care to the city's most vulnerable people, including immigrants who have limited or no insurance.
To turn the hospital around, government officials need to provide even more public dollars, Cobb said.
Marcucci, Community First's CEO and chief medical officer since 2023, also said in an interview that he is proud of the work his hospital does every day.
Marcucci has worked at Community First since starting as an emergency room physician in 2015. He said the rapid growth of uninsured and Medicaid patients -- along with government reimbursement denials and delays -- has slowed Community First's revenue streams.
Marcucci denied some of the accounts Block Club heard from patients and staff, such as the stories of food shortages, and he downplayed others, saying it was "difficult to respond to anecdotal comments without understanding who is making the comment and the exact period of time."
Despite the hospital's struggles, Marcucci noted that Community First provided more than $7.5 million in uncompensated and unreimbursed care in 2023.
Still, that is the lowest amount of charity care and other uncompensated services the hospital has provided in nearly a decade.
The challenges Community First faces are still impacting patients, many have told Block Club.
In 2024, when Arely Ocampo found her parents waiting in the Community First emergency room, she saw panic in her father's eyes -- and was terrified by her mother's labored breathing.
Ocampo yelled for help.
A half hour earlier, Ocampo had received a frantic phone call from her father, Miguel. Ocampo's mother, Leonarda, uses a breathing tube, but it became clogged while the couple was out shopping on the Northwest Side. Paramedics rushed them to the nearest hospital: Community First.
But the couple received little help in the emergency room, Ocampo said. The staff didn't speak Spanish or have an interpreter, which left Ocampo's parents confused and scared. Meanwhile, her mother's breathing got worse.
When Ocampo arrived, she demanded someone take action. Another 15 minutes passed before a respiratory therapist arrived, and it was even longer before the medical staff could help Leonarda, Ocampo said.
"They had the equipment ready, but the wall outlet it was attached to had no power," Ocampo said. "So they started running around the room and hallway looking for a working outlet. Then it turned out that the hose had no pressure to suction."
Ocampo's fear deepened as each attempt failed and staff dashed in and out of the room. What was in store for her mother? she wondered.
But when the staff finally got the machine to work, Leonarda's breathing improved. She was discharged less than an hour later.
Ocampo said she understands the hospital plays an important role in the neighborhood and staff have helped many people.
But she still wonders how many patients end up suffering after receiving care like her mother did.
"Why do they keep bringing people here?" Ocampo said. "If my mom was really bad, she would've died."
She added, "I think you have a better chance of surviving the extra five minutes going to another hospital."