So what are the deal's primary advantages for Abbott and its shareholders? And why do you think this deal is happening now?

That's a really good question.

According to Abbott, the businesses are completely separate.

The nutrition business has consumer-facing brands like Similac Baby Food and Pedialyte and Ensure.

And Abbott's main health care business is cardiac valve products.

And diabetes continuous glucose monitors and other very healthcare medically oriented products.

And so they go to market differently and they've got different operating margins and different revenue pictures.

Am I understanding that right?

How do they envision what's gonna happen in that arena?

In a statement, they, uh, they said that the merger will actually increase competition, uh, uh, and increase access for patients as the combined system improves and creates more academic medicine and research opportunities, clinical trial, uh, opportunities.

Another thing that the two organizations say is going to really improve things for all patients is a issue that Rush particularly has championed, which is, uh, an equity view, but an equity view aimed at reducing the life expectancy gap from the underserved population and more affluent, uh, populations.

Uh, Rush has been doing that primarily on the west side, uh, but they wanna take the model that they're building and move it out into the larger community throughout the Chicago area, uh, and into the suburbs.

CEO Dr. Omar Latif at Rush says that he really wants to bring this life expectancy lens to all the communities in Chicago and around the nation really, and, uh, look at it not necessarily zip code to zip code and improving, uh, that gap, but populations that are living shorter than, uh, other populations, and, uh, bringing all those populations up to a higher life expectancy.

It seems to me from this that this is Rush's next move to be seen in the same light as Northwestern Medicine and UChicago Medicine.

It really does give Rush an opportunity to really get its name across a broad spectrum, uh, in Chicago, and going into all the communities where Endeavor has a foothold.

Um, you know, Arlington Heights at, uh, uh, Northwest Community, the North Shore, even into the North Side, uh, with Swedish and, uh, uh, the Elmhurst and, uh, Edward DuPage areas.

It was receiving funds from a state program that was designed to prevent these kinds of closures, but now that money isn't available anymore?

Right.

Uh, I was speaking to, uh, CEO Tim Egan, uh, who has periodically had issues keeping his, uh, his small safety net on the South Side afloat, running, making payroll, et cetera.

Um, and, uh, he said that in terms of labor and delivery, about five years ago, a safety net supplemental, uh, obstetrical payment plan was passed by the state.

And in the first year, Roseland got $5 million out of that.

That was, uh, enough to keep the program, uh, solvent, keep, uh, keep it sustainable, and allow for them to have a stable funding source for that, uh, program, which otherwise would lose money.

But as more safety net hospitals got into the pool and labor and delivery numbers at Roseland, uh, fell further and further, he's now getting 500,000.

It's University of Chicago Ingalls in the south suburbs, correct?

Why did they leave the state and what does that mean for the biotech industry?

Yeah, the basic science came out of Dr. Martin Burke's chemistry lab at the University of Illinois, where he had developed something called block chemistry, a novel approach to building small molecules that could be used in drug discovery.

So back in 2014, Burke co-founded Revolution Medicines with incubation support from the University of Illinois.

But the company really took off following $45 million in funding, which was led by Boston-based Third Rock Ventures.

It's that coastal money that really drives basic science into translational medicine, really.

So Third Rock director Dr.

Mark Goldsmith took Revolution Medicines to California back in 2015, becoming CEO of the company.

So do you think that there is a way with this sort of investment and building of infrastructure that the state could attract those back who have left already?

Tell me.

Right.

Baxter has a new CFO.

They announced on Wednesday morning.

And John Rogers comes from a stint at Smith & Nephew, a medtech company based in the UK, but he was based in the US.

He comes at a good time to fill in the gap left by Joel Gray, who left the CFO spot in March.

Baxter under their relatively new CEO, Andrew Heider, is trying to transform itself, trying to fix its operational difficulties, trying to put together some profitable quarters and trying to strengthen up their balance sheet and deleverage themselves as they go forward.

And then we can turn our attention to GE Healthcare, another C-suite change there, too.

But let's start by talking about falling death rates in Illinois, how they have fallen over a decade, and, and how that's, uh, sparked looking at, at kind of what, what's behind that.

Right.

A report about falling death rates in Illinois over, uh, the last decade, uh, got us looking at, uh, the death rate in Illinois as well as, uh, looking at Chicago which has also, uh, had a cut in its death rate, particularly, uh, and really notably in the area of opioid overdoses.

So a recent state-by-state report by, uh, Stateline showed Illinois' death rate over the last 10 years between 2015 and, uh, 2025 fell, uh, nearly 3%, uh, 2.9%, and that decrease was, was significant.

Surrounding states have all inched up for different reasons, but an overall decrease in the rate in the nation.

We took a look at that, then I looked to the city of Chicago and the Chicago Department of Health.

In a nine-year period starting in 2015, the same year that, uh, uh, Stateline started out, to 2024, the last year that it had good data, the death rate in Chicago dropped 9.1%, uh, triple Illinois' number, and much of that drop came from a decrease in opioid overdose, and the city's really been hitting the scourge of opioid deaths pretty hard.

What's the latest?

Yeah

... into the, into the areas where we can have some landscaping.

Um, but yeah, the, the parking lot is, is effectively done.

And, um, and then out at the, um, baseball and softball field at, um, out there at Bednar Complex, we are still in the middle of that, and that timeline's till November, so it's all falling within the acceptable guidelines of the, of the time.

Um, but that's going well.

We went out there just, uh, a couple days ago and inspected the...

They've poured all the footings for the new bleachers, um, and that, that looks really good.

If you were recruiting for the next District 205 superintendent, what would your pitch be?

Tell me what's going on there.

Right, Amy.

Um, so Weiss Memorial is the, uh, Uptown hospital that was closed last August by Resilience Healthcare.

Resilience Healthcare owns two hospitals, Weiss Memorial in Uptown and West Suburban in Oak Park, both of which were struggling when Resilience picked them up, but have now shut down because of financial issues and infrastructure issues.

Weiss Memorial originally, uh, last summer shut down most of its operations 'cause of its air conditioning, then they lost their ability to get reimbursed by Medicare because of those, uh, shutdowns and, uh, the lack of air conditioning in the building.

The owner and CEO of Resilience Healthcare, Manoj Prasad, is vowing that he wants to reopen it.

He's appealing the, uh, Medicare and Medicaid lockout of payments, and he went to the Illinois Healthcare Services and Review Board on Tuesday to get a six-month extension of his temporary shutdown.

Tell me about this.

alleged that they're doing to drag their feet?

UIC is challenging the certification of the union, and Local 73 says that they're going about it by going to the courts after the Illinois Educational Labor Relations Board already rejected their attempt to delay bargaining.

So UIC had no comment on pending litigation, but UIC has gone to state court to seek a delay in bargaining.

While they challenge the validity of the locals claim that these advanced practice providers actually want to form the union.

The problem with that is SEIU 73 has said that the Illinois Educational Labor Relations Board has already rejected that delay tactic.

And instead of accepting the appointed board's decision, UI Health is going to an appeal with the district court in Springfield.

There's no hurrying them.

Exactly, exactly.

So, John, tell me about the latest in this saga.

Well, it's another piece of the puzzle.

Lawyers for Resilience Healthcare, the owner of West Suburban Hospital, have pulled out of the lawsuit between Resilience and the landlord, Ramco Holdings.

Attorneys for Lyle-based Momkus law firm, said they had disagreements with Resilience about how the settlement was proceeding.

They've left the case and Resilience Healthcare has brought on a new lawyer, Howard Brookins, a former 21st Ward Alderman, to represent it in the matters.

Donald Hopkins lawyers still represent Manoj Prasad, the 60% owner of Resilience and CEO of the health system.

And so for this particular strike that was averted, the strike that didn't happen, right, what was the catalyst of it? There were a couple of issues that you mentioned in your reporting, but what was the one thing that really kind of pushed this forward?

Yeah, the Maintenance Workers Union Commission said that they were coming to the table and bargaining in good faith and that Prime Healthcare was not.

Tell me what's going on now.

Right.

Well, the end of this month, early, uh, next month was supposed to be, uh, the point at which CEO Manoj Prasad was going to reopen, and, uh, last week, uh, he hit a, uh, a different snag.

The, uh, Village of Oak Park closed down the building for other providers who were still working in West Suburban Medical Center, and the amount of outpatient services that West Suburban had begun to provide, 'cause the elevators apparently are all not working.

Firefighters from Oak Park were called in to rescue patients from, uh, uh, upper floors because the last remaining elevator was on the fritz, and, uh, the Village of Oak Park stepped in and shuttered the building completely.

Last year it was Weiss Memorial that first closed most of its services because its air conditioning units broke down, and it was alleged that they, uh, couldn't be fixed in a short period of time.

Then another governmental entity, uh, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, shut down payment to, uh, the hospital, and it was shuttered completely.

[laughs] Tell me about what's happening there.

Seemed at first really, really unclear what happened, but then this LinkedIn post perhaps hinted about a few things.

Exactly.

If you're resigning, uh, you don't really put out a post saying, "Here's my accomplishments.

Here's my successes." Does that seem like a successful tenure to you? But that's exactly what, uh, Dr.

Ige, uh, did on, uh, the, the post attributed to her name.

And, you know, she goes through a number of, uh, a number of things.

And it seems a little bit telling that she talks about a really strong track record of staying on top of infectious diseases, coming out of the pandemic, jumping into a mass vaccination effort after, uh, measles was found in, uh, a migrant shelter in Pilsen, taking a strong leadership role on, uh, other outbreaks like varicella and Mpox and group A strep.

For now, though, while I have you here, I would love to hear more about, uh, the Chicago startup that is betting $55 million on the city as a Midwest biotech hub.

And is that really where you're seeing the concentration of AI, or is it kind of spread out throughout the healthcare and pharmaceutical space?

It's a bit spread out.

Uh, there's a lot of AI use and a lot of apps that employers are using for their employees to get better information on who the best provider is or what kind of provider they can use, whether it's, uh, telehealth or, uh, an alternative provider that's going to meet their expectations and maybe save money.

But they're also concentrating a lot of their AI on pharmacy benefit managers and pharmaceutical spending.

In addition to AI, consultants are also talking about really taking a hard look at how those pharmacy benefit managers, those PBMs, are contracting with them and whether they're transparent with their data.

A knock on PBMs has been that employers really need a doctorate in healthcare informatics just to know what they're, uh, saving and what they're not saving through PBM contracts.

I'm also hearing that, uh, well, a typical contract, you know, you wanna do a multi-year contract to lock in some prices.

The, uh, parent company has posted a nearly $2 billion loss for 2025.

But what is the latest?

Yeah, the West Suburban medical saga keeps moving along.

West Suburban in Oak Park is a safety net hospital that's had its financial troubles for decades.

years, if not decades.

Right now, it's been closed since March 27th.

And at the beginning of this week, it looked like there was a full court pressure to somehow oust the CEO and majority owner of Resilience Healthcare, the hospital system that owns the hospital.

Then, faster than he actually shut down the Oak Park Hospital, CEO Manoj Prasad announced he was reopening some primary care services, doctor appointments.

Talk about Olympia Fields, if you would.

Is it reasonable to expect that this hospital will reopen given the other hospital and how that went?

That's a really good question.

The closure of West Suburban Medical Center follows last year's closure of Weiss Memorial Hospital in Uptown, both owned by Resilience Healthcare, the only two hospitals owned by Resilience.

And it raises a lot of questions about the company and the how Prasad is going to try to reopen both hospitals.

He suggests that he wants to reopen both hospitals.

Part of the problem with both hospitals actually was a problem of an inherited infrastructure that Prasad said just fell apart.

At Weiss Memorial in Uptown, the air conditioning system last summer gave way, and they were only able to keep a couple of segments of the hospital open until Medicare came in and said, we're not going to let you bill for Medicare and Medicaid services anymore, which closed the hospital completely.

Do you think that resilience had the full picture when they stepped in? Is this maybe casting doubt on their ability to run this? I mean, there's a lot of questions here around who ultimately is kind of holding the bag here in terms of who's to blame for what has happened.

Tell me about that.

Right.

After putting out their proxy for 2025 last week, they announced that CFO Joel Grade was leaving to spend time with his family.

So they're bringing along their chief accounting officer and controller, Anita Zielinski, to serve as interim CFO.

And she'll keep her controller roles open.

going forward as Baxter looks for a new CFO.

Raid's leaving was amicable according to a filing by Baxter, but it does allow Andrew Hyder to sort of bring his own financial talent to bear on the company at a time when he's looking to transform the company and improve operating and accountability standards there.

Tell me the latest.

You've also recently written about how the Department of Education plans to make it harder for nurses to get student loans over certain amounts, especially for graduate degrees, which layers on to this issue really and compounds it.

Right.

Nursing educators are scratching their heads on that one in that taking nursing and other graduate level health care professions out of the definition of quote unquote professional degrees causes nursing students who are looking to climb that ladder and get graduate degrees a lot of hesitancy because they don't know whether they'll be able to borrow enough money.

It's $100,000 cap for nurses versus other quote unquote professional degrees, which can borrow up to $250,000.

Dean of UIC's nursing school has said that she's already seen nurses hesitant about moving into more professional degrees into enrolling further because of the student loan question.

And she points out that it's not only going to hamper the amount of professional graduate nurses coming out of nursing schools.

But a lot of those graduate students in nursing will go into teaching and go into academics.

What is that City Colleges partnership about?

Has he listed out really what those longer-term problems are?

Yes.

Andrew Heider came on in August and took over from longtime CEO Jose Alameda.

And Heider came in to transform the business, get back to some core principles, pay down some debt.

and really try to straighten out operations after a couple of years of turmoil.

And instead, he's started out having to deal with the IV solution cutback and missing expectations and a lot of volatility in what they say they're going to do and how they're actually performing.

Another issue that he came in in the middle of is a stoppage of delivery of their Novum IQ infusion pump, and that's put a strain on their infusion business as well.

Where is that playing into all this? Not necessarily just with Baxter, but how are we seeing this playing out in healthcare right now?

Talk to me about how that looked throughout the year, especially in the second half of the year.

A lot of different pressures on insurance and coverage in general.

One of the things that happened earlier in the year is that the state's fund for health insurance for immigrant adults went away simply because the state could not afford the growing price tag for it.

And now Medicaid is under pressure as in the coming years, there's going to be work requirements and re-enrollment requirements that threaten to drop people off the Medicaid rolls.

And likely the next stop is uninsured and bad debt care for hospitals.

But most recently, it's been the fight that shut down the federal government over extending the expanded premium tax credits from the Biden administration.

That's still up in the air now, but it's already manifested itself in much higher ACA premiums.

Where do you see that in the year ahead?

So tell me what's going on with Get Covered Illinois.

So Get Covered Illinois is the healthcare.gov version of a Illinois Affordable Care Act insurance coverage.

This year, the state set up an independent marketplace where they can provide basically the same kind of insurance that the federal ACA marketplace provides, but they have more flexibility in deadlines, rules.

and how much support they give to people looking for health care coverage.

So moving the deadline from December 15th all the way to the end of the year for coverage that starts January 1st is one of the big examples of the kind of flexibility that being a state-run marketplace gives Get Covered Illinois.

And that is not because of the shift to a state-sponsored marketplace.

That's really a good point.

Right.

As they were describing that and how that would impact their various organizations, what were some of the solutions that they're perhaps working towards?

So the panel was made up of Sean O'Grady, the president of acute care over at Endeavor, and Deanne Nichols, the president of Advocate Healthcare, the Illinois hospitals of Advocate, as well as the CEO of Cook County Health, Dr. Eric Mikaitis, and the CEO of UChicago Medicine's Ingalls Hospital down in Harvey.

So it was a mix of two big health systems, the largest safety net provider, Cook County Health, and the community safety net provider, ingles interestingly enough part of the solution uh coming out of the larger health systems advocate and endeavor uh was a discussion about how they're going to look in the in the future and that they might not be able to be everything to everyone everywhere they might not be as as widespread with their services but kind of pull back to sort of centers of excellence of uh cancer institutes and orthopedic hospitals and cardiovascular centers and not provide that kind of service at every single hospital they have.

Sean O'Grady over at Endeavor saying that you don't necessarily want to go to your local hospital that's done 20 open heart surgeries in the last year.

When you can go to a hub, a center that has done hundreds and hundreds of open heart surgeries.

And that might be a change going forward.

Where did the leaders fall on that?

It's interesting.

And I am very interested in that kind of secondary trauma of people who work in a mental health capacity, who are there to support people who are reaching out with mental health issues, the support that they themselves need and trauma they might be experiencing.

Yeah, a few different people said sort of that vicarious trauma, listening and seeing what people are going through, experiencing trauma.

as they are activists or filming what ICE is doing or protesting what ICE is doing, is causing them their own stress.

But also that there's kind of a dichotomy.

This kind of activism, this kind of work in mental health is both rewarding and stressful.

And so getting out there and doing something about this situation where you feel you're not out of control or that you don't have any control over the situation.

It can be therapeutic, but at the same time, getting up against federal agents with a whistle, with a cell phone camera, getting tear gas thrown at you is less than therapeutic.

Talk to me about that particular group, because that's got to be kind of its own dynamic of trauma there.

So the message, it seems like, is, well, hang on, there are still options.

Right, exactly.

Launching the state-run marketplace is going to allow Illinois to be able to have more flexibility in what open enrollment periods it uses and providing more help to people using the ACA to find the right plan or to find an affordable plan in the face of these premium hikes.

It's not optimum for Illinois to have the launch of this new state marketplace, while they need to explain huge increases that they generally blame Washington on.

But by controlling the marketplace themselves, they're able to bring a lot more navigation and broker help to people looking for what their options might be.

They're posing it as better than the national plan.

Tell me about that and what the implications are there.

You know, this is actually part and parcel of trying to get ahead of all the shifting financial and policy pressures going on.

Talk to me about that as well.

Right.

This stems from an executive order.

Governor Pritzker signed earlier this year when RFK Jr. made comments about autism and looking to create a national database, a national registry of autistic patients.

The committee that's going to make recommendations has been named and it comes on the heels of the more recent federal pronouncements about Tylenol, which a number of people have, uh, take an issue with.

And some experts are saying that an increase in research is welcome, but there's a concern about how this data will be used and how the patients living with autism's privacy will be protected.

What will you be watching just in the weeks ahead concerning both of these committees here in Illinois?

One of the things I think that is yet to be seen is really how the federal government will react to what are essentially competing recommendations in the health sphere.

Is there a sense of states working together on this or pretty much states are kind of each going going their own way?

It seems like right now states may be going their own way or forming regional coalitions.

There's a real question on how it'll shake out.

The East Coast, led by Massachusetts and states in the Northeast, are looking at creating their own set of recommendation.

And the West Coast, California, Oregon, Washington, and now Hawaii are are talking about going outside the CDC recommendations.

Illinois actually had suggested they would do that fairly early on.

And when I say early on, a few weeks ago, they said that they may give their own recommendations.

How is that playing out in pharmacies?