Well now I'm learning something here. I see that it's not standard English in the USA. I'm in a commonwealth country where that's the standard way to say it[1], and both the source of the quote and the article were local. But now I wonder if the journalist writing it might have been originally from the USA.
To elaborate, it appears that American English treats "hospital" as a place. So you go to the hospital, just like you go to the airport, or the subway station.
On the other hand, Commonwealth English treats "hospital" as something more like a state. You go to hospital just like you go to work.
This is a really good way of defining the difference. Although for whatever reason, you are at work, but you are in hospital.
But English is weird like that isn't it. Considering that depending on where you live you can quite correctly do things "at the weekend", "on the weekend", "in the weekend", or even "over the weekend".
I'm probably wrong, but if I as to describe the rule in American English it would be "to the [place]" and "to [activity]". "Work" is an activity, just like practice, rehearsal, school, class, etc. but "hospital" is not.
That's a good way to think about it. I couldn't think of a rule for when I drop the article. I guess for the state in the US we would say "hospitalized". So I would say "he was hospitalized", unless the identity of "they" in the original quote was important.
If you refer to the place by its name, then I think you can drop the article. e.g. "I went to Burger King"; saying "I went to the Burger King" would be fine on its own but a bit odd if you're not going to add further clarifying information suggested by your use of "the", such as "... on main street (as opposed to the one on 5th)". Similarly, "I went to Overlake Medical Center (the nearest hospital)".
"Burgle" is not a particularly common verb (746k results for "burgle" with quotes on Google) compared to "burglar" (40m), so it's not on the tip of the tongue.
The American instinct is then to reconstruct a verb from the more common noun, and the -ize pattern fits.
I'd guess that if you asked an American, they'd say that a burglar robs.
