Sometime in the coming months, the scandal-plagued, corruption-scarred, worse-than-useless Illinois Health Facilities Planning Board likely will cease to exist.

You can stop applauding. It’s not what you think: The board, which regulates hospital construction, isn’t being abolished, as this page has urged.

It’s just getting a new name — the Health Facilities and Services Review Board — if a proposal in the legislature passes and is signed by Gov. Pat Quinn. The board would add four more members (for a total of nine). And the board members, who have been unpaid, would get paid. (One good thing: That would be a government salary, not the pay-to-play shakedown schemes that tainted the board in the Rod Blagojevich era.)

This is progress? Not in our book.

Read more at the Chicago Tribune

Image: Purple Hotel in Lincolnwood, Illinois, site of many ah-hoc meetings concerning healthcare facilities planning in Illinois.