Northwell Health posted a 1.42% operating margin for the fourth quarter of 2023, bringing the health system back in the black, according to financial results released Monday.
The performance represents an improvement over the fourth quarter of 2022, when the system recorded a negative margin. Total revenues ballooned to $4.4 billion, a jump of nearly 7%. Patient services revenue grew by 7% to about $4 billion while other revenue grew by almost 17% to $419 million.
In notes on the system’s full 2023 performance, Northwell management attributed the increases to higher pharmacy sales and payment rates and growth in Northwell’s ambulatory care and physician network. In the last quarter of 2023, the system opened a $16 million center for advanced neurological procedures in Sleepy Hollow and a $52 million multispecialty facility in Rego Park, two of its most recent examples of expansion.
Volume for many services is at or above prepandemic levels, the management discussion also noted, contributing to higher revenues.
Barbara Osborn, a spokeswoman for the health system, declined to comment on Northwell’s fourth-quarter performance. However, she said that Northwell received a Medicare rate settlement for the 340B federal drug program and an influx of funding from the Federal Emergency Management Agency for Covid-19 relief in 2023, helping to increase revenue for the year overall.
As revenues grew for the quarter, so did costs. The system’s total expenses reached $4.3 billion for the quarter, a nearly 5% boost. Wage expenses grew by 3% to just over $2 billion while supply expenses rose to $1.3 billion, a 4% increase. Benefits expenses grew the most to nearly $489 million, a 13% jump.
Management attributed the growth to cost of living wage increases the system implemented to keep pace with the changing economic environment, facility investments to grow capacity and physician and ambulatory network expansion. The system also invested in information technology and patient safety initiatives that contributed to rising salary and benefit expenses, according to the notes, and worked to lower its supply chain spending to control supply costs. Osborn added that going forward Northwell will focus on tightening operations and growing certain areas of business in an effort to bring results back to prepandemic levels.
Northwell Health operates 21 hospitals and 900 ambulatory facilities and physician practices across Long Island, the city and Westchester.
NYPD officers were deployed to Columbia University late Tuesday evening and entered a building where pro-Palestinian demonstrators have barricaded themselves.
CNN’s live broadcast showed NYPD officers entering Hamilton Hall, the focal point of the protest, which had been occupied by protesters early Tuesday. Dozens of people have been arrested and loaded into buses, CNN reported.
In a statement late Tuesday, Columbia said the NYPD was brought in shortly after 9 p.m. to restore order and ensure the safety of the campus community.
“After the University learned overnight that Hamilton Hall had been occupied, vandalized, and blockaded, we were left with no choice,” a university spokesman said. “Columbia public safety personnel were forced out of the building, and a member of our facilities team was threatened. We will not risk the safety of our community or the potential for further escalation.”
Further uptown, police made arrests outside City College of New York, dispersing protesters and erecting steel barricades in the area. Despite the police action, the protest encampment at Columbia remains intact, the New York Times reported.
Shortly before the clashes, Mayor Eric Adams, addressing the media alongside Rebecca Weiner, the NYPD’s deputy commissioner for intel and counterterrorism, and other police officials condemned the protesters’ actions and said the police were on standby and prepared to step in if requested by university leadership.
“We cannot and will not allow what should be a peaceful gathering to turn into a violent spectacle that serves no purpose,” said Adams. “We cannot wait till this situation becomes even more serious. This must end now.”
Adams raised alarm over the influence of “professional outside agitators” on the student-led demonstrations and warned students to leave.
Columbia officials responded swiftly on Tuesday, threatening expulsion for any student who refused to leave the occupied building. The campus has been placed under a partial lockdown, allowing access to only essential staff and some students.
“If you are a parent or guardian of a student, please call your child and urge them to leave the area before the situation escalates in any way,” Adams told reporters.
Breaking up can be pricey in the world of luxury real estate.
Jason Brown, a former partner at RFR Holding, the firm behind the Chrysler Building, the Seagram Building and other high-profile sites, nabbed a hefty $25 million exit package upon leaving the company in 2019, according to a new court filing about an ongoing case in the matter.
In general, details about executive pay are usually negotiated secretly and kept under wraps at privately-held firms such as RFR, whose co-principals and co-founders are Aby Rosen and Michael Fuchs.
But the payout for Brown, who served as the chief operating officer, spilled out into the open after Rosen and Fuchs stopped making installments on Brown’s payment in winter 2021. After the missed payment, which was supposed to be Brown’s third, Brown dragged his ex-bosses into court.
The battle, which does not appear to have been previously reported, appears to have been settled in spring 2021 with Rosen and Fuchs agreeing to pay a penalty of 12% interest on the missed amount and to resume wiring money, court records show. The developers also had to admit wrongdoing.
“I admit that I defaulted on my obligations under the promissory note,” Rosen wrote in court papers. “I admit that I have not asserted and do not have any defense to justify, excuse or otherwise defend against my default.”
Because confessions like the developers’ are enforceable only for three years, a judge also ordered Rosen and Fuchs to admit wrongdoing again at a later date, which led to a similar confession that appeared Tuesday in Manhattan Supreme Court.
Since tangling with Brown, RFR’s principals appear to have stayed current. Brown apparently has received a $3.5 million payment every winter since 2021, records show, and can supposedly expect to continue reaping identical windfalls until 2026.
It’s not known why RFR parted ways with Brown, who was in his late 40s when he left the company after more than a decade in a C-suite position. The same year Brown left RFR, he listed his nine-bedroom Greenwich mansion for $16.4 million and sold it for $12.5 million the following year, according to Zillow. RFR’s current COO is Michael Astarita, according to the company’s website.
As have many office landlords in the post-Covid period, RFR appears to have struggled with persistent office vacancies. A $105 million mortgage backed by a half-empty RFR office building at 90 Fifth Ave. near Union Square was sent to special servicing in March after its property taxes went unpaid.
Similarly, in 2022 RFR lost control of the Gramercy Park Hotel, the downtown rock-and-roll icon, after a yearslong dispute with land owner Solil Management, a real estate arm of the Goldman family, over millions of dollars in Covid-related missed rent payments.
However in a blockbuster 11th-hour deal, RFR did recently manage to refinance the maturing debt on its signature property, the landmark Seagram Building at 375 Park Ave., after securing a $1.1 billion loan package from lender JVP Management.
The 33-year-old RFR also owns the Chrysler Building at 405 Lexington Ave., though not its land, which is controlled by the college Cooper Union.
A phone message left for RFR’s spokesman was not returned, and Brown could not be reached by press time.
The city is scrambling to beef up its team of staffers who will enforce New York’s building climate law, Local Law 97, ahead of a fast-approaching 2025 deadline for property owners to submit reports proving that they are in compliance with the contentious law.
Newly proposed investments in Mayor Eric Adams proposed executive budget for the 2025 fiscal year allocate $4 million and 36 new full-time staffers to enforce the city’s landmark decarbonization law that began to take effect for some 50,000 buildings at the start of the year.
The new full-time positions would more than double the current team of 22 people working in the Department of Buildings preparing to enforce Local Law 97. With the additional staff, the city would have a total of 58 people dedicated to the implementation and enforcement of the law. That would be a dramatic uptick from the sparse team of 11 the Department of Buildings said it had focused on the issue in February, and would help ensure the measure has teeth in enforcing reluctant building owners to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.
The investment is in advance of a May 2025 requirement for building owners affected by the law to submit reports to the building’s department detailing their annual greenhouse gas emission. If a building exceeds its carbon cap, owners will face fees of $268 for every ton of carbon dioxide over the limit. That could translate to fines of tens of thousands of dollars each year.
Buildings officials will be tasked with the work of collecting and analyzing thousands of reports, along with doling out and enforcing penalties to building owners who fail to meet their new annual emissions targets.
The new resources are a result of the city’s new climate budgeting process unveiled Tuesday to advance city sustainability and resilience efforts.
Recruitment for the positions has been particularly tricky for the buildings department because they require occupational licenses and the city faces robust competition from the private sector, according to city officials.
Climate advocates and City Council members have, in recent months, pushed in closed-door meetings for more staff and resources dedicated to Local Law 97.
“I think we're generally seeing that the administration is recognizing the call to meet the greater need in this specific department,” said Shravanthi Kanekal, senior resiliency planner for the NYC Environmental Justice Alliance. “This is definitely a step in the right direction.”
Donna De Costanzo, the northeast regional lead for climate and energy at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said she was “heartened” to see that the Adams administration is giving the enforcement of Local Law 97 greater attention.
“It's critical that New York City continue to allocate the capacity and resources needed to implement the law and ensure there's an adequate and sustained budget to make it a success,” De Costanzo said.
Hours after student protesters at Columbia University took over a campus building, Mayor Eric Adams warned against further escalation on Tuesday and claimed that “professional outside agitators” had “co-opted” a peaceful demonstration.
Pro-Palestinian demonstrators began occupying Hamilton Hall on Columbia’s Morningside Heights campus overnight, without any reported resistance from law enforcement. The city has maintained a large police presence outside the campus gates, responding to what Adams said was a request by Columbia’s administrators.
“They asked us to come into all their entry points to monitor that,” Adams said during an unrelated press conference on Tuesday, adding that people unaffiliated with the university had tried to join the campus protests. “The entry to the school is on the streets and it’s important to protect the streets.”
Adams and NYPD officials have said for days that officers would not move onto Columbia’s campus unless their presence was requested by administrators, as happened last week when officers arrested more than 100 people who had camped out on the school’s south lawn. But the mayor also added Tuesday that the occupation of a building marked an “elevation” of tensions.
“We cannot allow the elevation of actions like that,” Adams said.
Hours later, Tuesday evening, Adams called another press conference at NYPD headquarters, where he and top police officials repeated a claim that outsiders unaffiliated with Columbia had infiltrated the protest and sown discord. Officials refused to identify any of those people, but Rebecca Weiner, the NYPD’s deputy commissioner for intelligence and counterterrorism, said that some had been known to frequent prior protests such as Occupy Wall Street and the Stop Cop City movement in Atlanta.
“A lot of people involved, some are known to us, and others are reported by university officials to be unaffiliated with campus” Weiner said, adding that the destruction of security cameras on campus had hampered attempts to identify people. Weiner showed reporters footage and photos of people clad in black smashing windows and barricading doors at Hamilton Hall, but did not specify which of the people shown were alleged to be outsiders.
Students who are occupying Hamilton Hall would face charges of third-degree burglary, criminal mischief and trespassing if police are invited onto campus, said Kaz Daughtry, the NYPD’s deputy commissioner for operations. People who remain camped out outside would be charged with trespassing and disorderly conduct.
Columbia is threatening to expel students who are occupying the building, and is suspending students who did not leave an outdoor encampment before a deadline it set Monday. Student protesters have said they will remain inside the building until the university meets their demands, which include disclosing the university’s financial investments and divesting from companies with ties to Israel.
“We made it very clear yesterday that the work of the university cannot be endlessly interrupted by protesters who violate the rules,” the office of Columbia’s president Minouche Shafik wrote in a Tuesday afternoon email to the university community. “Continuing to do so will be met with clear consequences. Protesters have chosen to escalate to an untenable situation — vandalizing property, breaking doors and windows, and blockading entrances —and we are following through with the consequences we outlined yesterday.”
Adams offered a measure of sympathy for the students earlier Tuesday, defending their right to free speech and saying Tuesday that he had protested for causes such as divestment from Apartheid South Africa during his days as a college student. But the mayor has also condemned those associated with the Columbia protest who have been seen making antisemitic remarks. (Student organizers have called their protest peaceful, and at least some of the hateful rhetoric has been attributed to members of the public unaffiliated with the student group.)
A large number of police officers continued to surround the Columbia campus on Tuesday, concentrated mostly along the East Side of Broadway where the university’s main campus lies.
Also on Tuesday, Gov. Kathy Hochul told reporters that students occupying the academic building “are clearly breaking the law” and called for accountability — whether through “disciplinary action from the school or from law enforcement.”
The mayor, asked earlier whether the National Guard should be sent in — a fraught possibility given the deadly results at Kent State University half a century ago — said immediately that such an escalation would not be necessary.
“The NYPD is doing an amazing job,” Adams said.
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The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration is recommending cannabis be reclassified as less risky, people familiar with the matter said — a move that could help the legal marijuana industry benefit from tax breaks. Pot stocks surged on the news.
Several steps remain in the process of rescheduling marijuana to Schedule III from Schedule I, said the people, who asked not to be named because the information hasn’t yet been made public. This would ease access to cannabis without decriminalizing it.
Shares of cannabis-related companies surged in Tuesday trading, with Tilray Brands jumping as much as 33%, while Canopy Growth Corp. soared nearly 40%. Meanwhile, the MJ PurePlay 100 Index, which tracks 95 global stocks exposed to the cannabis industry, climbed about 18%, its biggest one-day gain since October 2022.
“Rescheduling is likely to bring a vibrant return of investor interest that could quickly move the sector back to robust optimism,” said Morgan Paxhia, co-founder of Poseidon Investment Management, which invests in cannabis.
A majority of Americans believe marijuana should be decriminalized for recreational or medical use, a policy that Biden said he would pursue while in office but that still lacks widespread support in Congress. Biden’s favorability has waned among key voting blocs that favor legalization that he needs to win reelection, including young voters and Black Americans.
Rescheduling, if ultimately enacted, would represent a boon to the legal cannabis industry that is estimated to have generated around $35 billion in sales last year, according to New Frontier Data, a market research firm. It responds to growing cries to reclassify the drug in order to make medical use easier, and bring in more tax dollars through regulated sales. The decision would push back against concerns that reclassifying the drug could make it harder to prosecute drug cartels, and that new high-potency forms of cannabis are addictive.
If marijuana is reclassified as Schedule III it will be treated like substances such as ketamine and anabolic steroids, which require prescriptions but aren’t federally prohibited. Marijuana is currently classified as Schedule I, which means it’s seen as equally risky to drugs such as heroin.
A spokeswoman for the DEA declined to comment, and referred calls to the DOJ.
“Moving to Schedule III represents a tectonic shift in our nation’s drug laws,” said the U.S. Cannabis Council, a trade group for the industry, adding that the change would end the tax penalty called 280E that bars companies that deal in federally illegal substances from taking tax deductions. The new legal status should help cannabis businesses of all sizes, the group said, and make the regulated market better able to compete with the illegal market.
In October 2022, President Joe Biden asked the Department of Health and Human Services secretary and the U.S. Attorney General to review how marijuana was scheduled based on its medical use, potential for abuse, safety and potential for dependence. Months later in August 2023, HHS sent a letter to the Drug Enforcement Administration head Anne Milgram recommending easing restrictions on marijuana by reclassifying it as a Schedule III drug under the Controlled Substances Act. The recommendation, which was first reported by Bloomberg News, set in motion the DEA’s own monthslong review process.
It was already shaping up to be one of the most chaotic college application seasons ever, with high school seniors facing the end of affirmative action, glitches in the federal financial aid system, concerns over soaring tuition costs and anxiety fueled by the ever-increasing competition to get into top colleges.
Then came the protests and arrests, canceled commencements, confrontations with police and angry debates on campuses across the U.S., reviving tensions that began after Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel and the subsequent bombardment of Gaza.
The renewed turmoil serves as a backdrop to the May 1 deadline for many high school seniors to pick a college. For the brightest students across America, it’s a choice that used to be easy: Go to the best college, regardless of cost. But skyrocketing prices and greater awareness about the burden of student debt have gradually shifted that calculus. Add on everything else, and it could further encourage decisions that might have been unthinkable in years past.
Consider the choice for Lila Anafi, a high school senior from the Philadelphia suburbs: attend the University of Pennsylvania, an Ivy League school, or the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Even though she would have gotten a roughly 75% tuition discount at Penn because her dad works there, putting estimated costs at about $40,000 a year, she picked UNC — where she got a full ride. She said she’s heard tales of “cutthroat” competition at Penn and thinks UNC might be a better fit culturally. Still, she worries about passing on the Ivy League.
“I worry I’m going to have a more difficult time getting jobs than I would otherwise,” she said.
That nagging concern about the return on investment is why making snap judgments based on the current environment is tricky, especially for those who got into top schools, said Leelila Strogov, chief executive of the college counseling company AtomicMind. Parents with children who have committed to highly ranked universities that haven’t been gripped by protests are glad they’re avoiding the Ivy League, where the spotlight seems to burn brighter, she said.
Yet, the draw of the most elite institutions remains strong for those who got accepted.
“It's hard to resist the Ivy League when you have it in your pocket,” Strogov said. “Once you have the opportunity, for the most part, you are taking it.”
Campus protests
The Ivy League has been at the center of the campus turbulence. Students at Harvard, Yale and Columbia have erected pro-Palestinian encampments, demanding that the schools divest from Israel. Some protesters have threatened Jewish students and expressed support for Hamas, which is designated a terrorist organization by the U.S. The universities are trying to figure out in real time how to balance free speech with maintaining order.
Dozens of students at Columbia entered a building known as Hamilton Hall after midnight Tuesday and barricaded themselves inside, saying they wouldn’t leave until the school yields to demands to divest its Israel holdings, according to the university’s student newspaper. At Yale, meanwhile, police began clearing an encampment and threatening to arrest protestors.
In the fall, some Jewish high school seniors, concerned by the antisemitism that burst into public view, decided to skip applying to Penn, Harvard and Columbia in favor of places where the atmosphere was less tense. Last week, Brandeis University extended its transfer deadline, seeking to woo students concerned about their safety by offering “an environment striving to be free of harassment and Jew-hatred.”
Yeshiva University said it was reopening its portal for transfer applicants and that it has created new faculty positions for professors “interested in being part of an institution whose core values align with their own.”
“No Jewish student should have to face the threats and intimidation that have sadly been taking place,” Ari Berman, Yeshiva’s president, said in a letter.
Prestige and costs
This year’s decision day also comes with heftier price tags. Many elite colleges now charge more than $90,000 a year, even with persistent questions about whether the most selective universities are worth the cost as millions struggle to cover student loan payments.
Getting into college is more competitive than ever, and with many wealthy families subscribing to an “Ivy or bust” mentality, parents have been willing to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to luxury consultants who all but guarantee admission to top schools.
Kristy Garcia, a first-generation college student from New Jersey, is waiting until the last minute to decide between Harvard or Duke. Garcia, a Peruvian-American who wants to study computer science and public policy, said she’s weighing whether to prioritize prestige and brand name, which would lead her to Harvard, or cultural fit, which would point towards Duke.
“It's difficult for me to choose,” Garcia said. “It’s hard being swayed by the Harvard name because then it’s like, do I really like Harvard? Or am I only going because of the prestige?”
Affirmative action
The unique challenges that have collided this year began before current high school seniors began applying to schools, when the Supreme Court banned affirmative action. That left many students and families with questions about whether or not to mention race in their applications, and forced schools to find new ways to hit their diversity goals.
Rokhyatou Toure, a high school senior from Detroit, heard about the decision while she was writing her college essays. She spent days pondering whether to include anything about her race, gender or even socioeconomic status.
She ended up writing about her family, which is originally from Senegal, and their traditions. She’ll attend Columbia in the fall.
“There was a lot of contradiction because campuses are saying on the website that they want diversity and they want broad perspectives,” she said. “It was a very scary time for me, especially navigating the whole process alone and not knowing what could happen.”