The Northridge Hospital Medical Center survived the Great Depression and the Northridge earthquake and everything in between, but it announced this week that it will be shutting down its Van Nuys campus due to the high cost of treating uninsured patients.

The announcement follows the closure of five other Los Angeles County emergency departments in the past two years, the New York Times reports.

“This is definitely cause for alarm,” Carol Meyer, director of the Los Angeles County Emergency Medical Services Agency, told the Times. “The whole system is more and more tenuous.” Meyer informed the Times that nearly one third of the nine million people in L.A. county “were underinsured or had no medical insurance at all.”

Not surprisingly, the Times gets through the entire article without mentioning that a substantial proportion of LA’s uninsured are illegal immigrants. The cost of providing them with health care is $340 million annually, according to County estimates.

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