Houston Healthcare's plans to merge with Emory Healthcare continued on Thursday as the Georgia Attorney General's office held a public hearing at Central Georgia Technical College to review the proposed transaction. The merger, structured as a "member substitution" rather than a sale, would make Emory Healthcare the sole member of Houston Healthcare while maintaining the local system as a Georgia nonprofit corporation.
A temporary lifeline was thrown to Crozer Health in a Texas bankruptcy hearing Thursday in the form of a $6 million donation. The short-term funding to cover hospital payroll is coming from a $5 million donation from Penn Medicine and another $1 million donation from Delaware County. That will help the two Delco hospitals stay open for at least another week to 10 days.
Connecticut's Office of Health Strategy approved a merger between Northwell Health, a large New York-based health system, and Nuvance Health, which owns Danbury, Norwalk, Sharon and New Milford hospitals in Connecticut, as well as three hospitals in New York. The two systems now have to complete the step of formally joining the entities together under the Northwell Health banner. Northwell isn't directly paying to buy the Nuvance Hospitals, per se, resulting in a technical purchase price of $0. Instead, the New York-based health system has agreed to invest $1 billion in Nuvance's Connecticut and New York hospitals over the next five years, with annual reporting on the progress of those investments.
The deadline imposed by Crozer Health parent company Prospect Medical Holdings for some entity to provide $9 million more to keep Crozer afloat appeared to pass quietly on Wednesday. That deadline was set Tuesday during a federal bankruptcy court hearing by the attorney representing Prospect at those proceedings.
Indiana-based Beacon Health System has reached a definitive agreement to acquire the Ascension health care system in Southwest Michigan. The agreement, expected to close this summer, includes the acquisition of four hospitals, 35 outpatient clinics and an ambulatory surgery center. The hospitals being acquired are: Ascension Borgess Hospital in Kalamazoo; Ascension Borgess Allegan Hospital; Ascension Borgess-Lee Hospital in Dowagiac; and Ascension Borgess-Pipp Hospital in Plainwell.
Attorney General Pam Bondi announced on Tuesday that she will be directing prosecutors at DOJ to seek the death penalty for Luigi Mangione, the man who allegedly gunned down UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson last year.