As healthcare gets more costly, and hospitals close in rural regions, states have moved to allow controversial, anti-competitive mergers of existing healthcare systems. Virginia is one of 18 states that allows such mergers, and a bipartisan effort that sailed through the 2025 session could see those mergers become more frequent. Virginia has a law that allows competing health systems to merge with the approval of the legislature. The only such system created in Virginia is Ballad Health, a network of 20 hospitals in the state's southwestern corner.
President Trump "exhibits excellent cognitive and physical health and is fully fit," according to White House physician Capt. Sean Barbabella. The White House released Trump's three-page medical report Sunday morning following the president's annual physical examination at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center on Friday.
Trump's Justice Department, through Attorney General Pam Bondi, announced earlier in the month that it will seek the death penalty against Mangione, in Bondi's words, 'as we carry out President Trump's agenda to stop violent crime and Make America Safe Again.' In his motion to take the death penalty off the table, Mangione's lawyers say Bondi's direction to Manhattan prosecutors — 'issued publicly, as a press release' — to seek a death sentence for him 'is political, arbitrary, capricious, a breach of established death penalty protocol and has now indelibly prejudiced this process.'
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.