IL lawmakers target private equity in healthcare, disability care

Illinois lawmakers are increasingly moving to scrutinize private equity’s role across healthcare and disability services, as concerns over hospital closures, quality of care, and financial practices tied to private equity-backed providers continue to grow.

This week, the Illinois Senate passed legislation sponsored by Sen. Graciela Guzmán that would strengthen oversight of healthcare mergers and acquisitions involving private equity firms and other investors. The legislation comes amid growing debate in Illinois over the role private equity firms have played in hospital instability and closures, including those tied to Pipeline Health’s ownership of Weiss Memorial Hospital, Westlake Hospital, and West Suburban Medical Center.

The bill’s advancement follows years of reporting, investigations, and advocacy around the impact private equity ownership can have on essential healthcare services. PESP research and analysis on Pipeline Health and private equity’s role in Illinois healthcare were cited prominently in legislative materials surrounding the bill.

At the same time, Illinois lawmakers are also considering separate legislation aimed at increasing oversight of private equity ownership in intellectual and developmental disability (IDD) services. Earlier this year, PESP submitted testimony in support of SB3118 and HB4728, legislation that would establish new guardrails around ownership transparency and financial practices involving IDD service providers.

In testimony submitted to the Illinois House Human Services Committee, PESP highlighted examples involving private equity-backed providers operating in Illinois, including Broadstep Behavioral Health, Help at Home, and Sevita. The testimony outlined concerns over aggressive consolidation, debt-funded financial extraction, regulatory investigations, and repeated quality-of-care violations tied to private equity-owned providers.

Those concerns were detailed further in PESP’s 2025 report on private equity in IDD services, which documented how private equity firms have increasingly acquired and consolidated providers serving people with intellectual and developmental disabilities across the country. The report included multiple Illinois examples.

Broadstep Behavioral Health, owned by Bain Capital, was once one of the largest providers of Community Integrated Living Arrangement (CILA) services in Illinois. Between 2021 and 2023, Illinois paid Broadstep more than $23.6 million for CILA services before the state revoked the company’s license to operate group homes in 2024 following repeated violations of quality standards.

The report also examined Sevita and Help at Home, two major IDD providers owned by private equity firms Centerbridge Partners and Vistria Group. Help at Home expanded aggressively through acquisitions, including the purchase of Community Care Systems Inc., which operates multiple branch locations throughout Illinois. PESP’s research documented how the firms extracted hundreds of millions of dollars through debt-funded dividend transactions even as investigations and complaints involving understaffing, inadequate training, and care deficiencies mounted across multiple states.

Illinois regulators and investigators have increasingly scrutinized some of these providers. In 2023, the Human Rights Authority of Illinois substantiated complaints involving Sevita related to inadequate communication and treatment planning.

Taken together, the healthcare merger legislation and the IDD oversight bills signal that Illinois lawmakers are increasingly examining the broader role private equity firms play across essential healthcare and human services systems.

PESP recently wrote about many of these broader concerns in a Chicago Sun-Times op-ed following the fallout tied to Pipeline Health’s ownership of hospitals in the Chicago area. As lawmakers continue debating new guardrails and oversight measures, Illinois is increasingly becoming a major state-level battleground over private equity ownership in healthcare.