If I want to start a brick-and-mortar business, there are few restrictions on when, where and how I do so.

Obviously, one must abide by zoning restrictions and other regulations—either local, state or federal—established for the community welfare, but in the United States we’re pretty well able to open any kind of legal business regardless of how many other businesses there are like it.

For example, although Walgreens, headquartered in north suburban Deerfield, seems to have a store on every corner (or, has been said, within a mile of every person in the area), that hasn’t stopped CVS from barging in here over the last few years to compete with the area giant.

It doesn’t stop a Jewel from being built across the street from a Dominick’s, or vice versa, or competing banks within a block of one another, or the array of auto dealerships that are clustered on major roads in one town or another.

So I’ll admit that it strikes me as weird, funny, ridiculous or whatever strange adjective you want to use that Elmhurst Hospital is running into opposition to its plan to rebuild the 81-year-old hospital on another site at the southern edge of the city.

You can read Dan McLeister’s news story on page 1 of this issue, detailing the opposition.

(Full disclosure: I grew up in Elmhurst in the 1950s and ’60s when the hospital was the main hospital in DuPage County. Opened in 1926, it’s the county’s oldest. In fact, I bet it’s a safe bet that most children born in DuPage between 1926 and 1950 who were not born at home were delivered at Elmhurst.)

Now, I know that some things are “territorial” in nature, like pro sports teams, whose leagues have rules against encroachment on another team’s fan base or what it perceives as its territory. The Baltimore Orioles’ owner was worried about the impact of a new team in Washington on his fan base when the Montreal Expos’ move to D.C. was being planned.

But lots of competing entities operate right next door to each other in perfect harmony. I can think of a two-block area in Elmhurst where there are about four or five churches clustered together. I don’t think the Methodists are worried that the Catholics are recruiting members from their church or that the United Church of Christ is worried that its collection plate will have less money with the Masonic Temple next door.

As far as this hospital building goes, I get it, yet I also don’t get it. I understand that you can’t build hospitals willy-nilly all over the place on a whim by administrators or physicians, but I’m darned if I can understand how a larger, better hospital in Elmhurst, serving substantially the same population it now serves, really hurts in any substantive way the hospitals that are lobbying against it.

Do these hospitals in other suburbs really have the interests of Elmhurst residents—or Elmhurst Hospital patients from whatever city—at heart? It would seem that the quick and dirty answer is “of course not.” The unsaid, “dirty” word here, folks, is profit.

Although some hospitals are labeled “non-profits,” it doesn’t mean they don’t have to pay bills or salaries or mortgage or municipal bond payments, so I do understand that they worry about losing patients to a “state-of-the-art” hospital.

Well, I guess my response to that is, upgrade your own facilities.

If one local dry cleaner buys equipment that cleans clothes more quickly or more efficiently at a lower cost, then it would behoove its competitors to do likewise, or lose customers.

I live in Lisle, which doesn’t have a hospital, so my understanding is that in the event of an emergency, I’d be carted to either Good Sam in Downers Grove or Edward in Naperville, whichever I choose, I guess, if I’m able to. Maybe the ambulance guys flip a coin. Heck, my physician is in Hinsdale, so maybe I’d have to truck on over (or be trucked) to Hinsdale or Elmhurst or LaGrange.

Point is, I think, that there are enough of us getting sick all the time that we need hospitals, and as my generation ages, and theoretically lives longer than our parents’ generation, we’ll need more care, not less.

And that means we’ll need the new Elmhurst in Elmhurst and the new Edward in Plainfield and the new Bolingbrook there and probably new facilities in the towns served by the group that’s leading the charge against Elmhurst.

We don’t need hospitals fighting over the “territorial rights” to us. I’m sure that in the coming decades there will be enough aging, sickly bodies to go around and keep those hospital profits rising.

And they’ll probably still be having better years than the Orioles or Nationals.

Contact editor Don Kopriva at dkopriva@thebusinessledger.com or at 630-428-8788.