WHY IS IT ALWAYS PARATROOPERS?!

German military paratrooper unit under probe over misconduct, extremism

Several dozen soldiers are being investigated for abuses, including sexual assault, "right-wing extremist and anti-Semitic incidents", violent rituals and using hard drugs, according to a local media report.

German paratroopers are performing at the Franz-Josef Strauss Bundeswehr base in Altenstadt, Germany, February 3, 2017 [FILE]. / Reuters

TRT/AA

12/29/2025

Germany's defence ministry has condemned "unacceptable" abuses in an elite paratrooper regiment amid ongoing investigations into alleged sexual misconduct and right-wing extremism.

The probe into the unit based in the southwestern town of Zweibruecken was launched after two women soldiers filed a complaint in June, the army confirmed.

The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung daily said on Monday that several dozen soldiers were being investigated for abuses, including sexual assault, "right-wing extremist and antisemitic incidents", violent rituals and using hard drugs.

Defence ministry spokesperson Kenneth Harms said disciplinary action had been taken against several members of the regiment, there had been "initial dismissals", and the commander had been replaced this year.

"To be perfectly clear, right-wing extremism and inappropriate sexual behaviour are the offences in question," he said. "Neither is acceptable in the Bundeswehr, and it is therefore imperative to investigate the incidents thoroughly.

"Anyone who has committed misconduct or even criminal offences, or who, as a superior, has looked the other way or tolerated such behaviour, will be dealt with appropriately."

‘Disciplinary measures’

An army spokesperson later said that investigations had been conducted against 55 suspects and dismissal proceedings initiated against 19, of whom three had already left the service.

"A total of 16 cases have been referred to the public prosecutor's office," she added. "Disciplinary measures have also been imposed in 16 cases, and the military disciplinary prosecutor's office has opened preliminary investigations in 20 cases."

State prosecutors in Zweibruecken said in November they were looking into accusations against 19 soldiers as part of the probe, and a spokesperson on Monday said the status of the investigations "has remained largely unchanged since then".

Germany has seen previous incidents of extremism in the armed forces.

An elite army commando force was dissolved in 2020 after revelations that some of its members harboured neo-Nazi sympathies.

Europe's largest economy is looking to revamp its armed forces and recently agreed on a new military service model to attract more recruits.

EU 2035 combustion-engine ban review: what’s at stake


By AFP
December 12, 2025

European carmakers would like to be able to sell hybrid vehicles after 2035 - Copyright AFP Kirill KUDRYAVTSEV

Frédérique PRIS

The European Commission is expected to announce on Tuesday measures relaxing a 2035 ban on new petrol and diesel car sales.

While Europe’s embattled auto industry and its backers have lobbied hard for Brussels to relax the ban, they are divided on exactly what measures to take.



– Why the 2035 target date? –



In 2023, despite the reluctance of Germany, the commission announced a ban on sales of new vehicles powered by internal combustion engines from 2035. Hybrids that use a combination of combustion engines and battery power are also included.

The ban is a key measure to help attain the EU’s target of carbon neutrality by 2050.

The date is important as vehicles spend an average of 15 years on the road in the EU and thus would be expected to have largely stopped spewing planet-warming emissions by around 2050.

The 2023 announcement included a provision for a review in 2026 but, under pressure from carmakers and governments, the commission pushed forward announcing proposed adjustments to the end of 2025.

The proposals will go to the European Parliament for review.



– What adjustments are possible? –



For those against the ban, it’s no longer just a question of shifting the 2035 date, but of relaxing certain provisions.

Carmakers would like to see continued sales authorised for hybrids with rechargeable batteries or those equipped with range extenders (small combustion engines which recharge the battery instead of powering the wheels).

Germany supports this option as do eastern European nations where German carmakers have set up factories.

The ACEA association of European carmakers doesn’t criticise the goal of electrification, but it said “the 2035 CO2 targets for cars and vans are no longer realistic”.

Another possible means to add some flexibility would be boosting the use of alternative fuels such as those derived from agricultural crops and waste products.

Italy supports this option.

But environmental groups are opposed to any massive turn to crop-based biofuels as it would likely boost the use of pesticides and aggravate soil depletion, and they are also sceptical about what emissions reductions can actually be achieved.

Moreover, as a majority of biofuels are imported, the EU wouldn’t gain in autonomy, another objective of the shift to electric vehicles.



– Carmakers out of alignment? –



European carmakers — BMW, Mercedes, Renault, Stellantis and VW — are not always on the same page even if they all want the rules to be relaxed.

This is principally due to their varying progress in shifting to electric models.

The industry that has grown up around the electric car sector — such as battery manufacturers, recharge stations and electricity companies — wants to keep the 2035 target with no adjustments.

“Rolling back these objectives would undermine the EU’s energy sovereignty, industrial leadership, and climate credibility,” said the UFE, a trade group for French electricity industry firms.

France, along with Spain and the Nordic countries, has long called for keeping to the trajectory to shift to electric vehicles in order to not harm firms that have made investments in the transition.

Paris has indicated it is open to some flexibility on the condition of local content being favoured, which pleases suppliers which have also come under intense pressure from cheaper Chinese competition.



– Is there a risk in backsliding? –



Yes, according to experts.

“What is considered a short-term advantage may not be one in the long term,” said Jean-Philippe Hermine at the IDDRI think tank that focuses on the transition in the transport sector.

Bernard Jullien, an economist at the University of Bordeaux, said keeping several different technologies imposes extra costs for companies.

It can also create uncertainty for them if consumers adopt a wait-and-see attitude, he added.

“Between China and its electric vehicles and the oil that Saudi Arabia and the United States wants to sell us, is the right choice to stick with our old technology?” asked Diane Strauss, head of the French office of T&E, an advocacy group for clean transport and energy.

Amazon targets as many as 30,000 corporate job cuts, sources tells Reuters

WHITE, BLUE, PINK 

THE COLOR OF YOUR COLLAR DOESN'T MATTER, 

WE ARE ALL PROLETARIANS NOW

By Reuters
Published: October 27, 2025 

Amazon is planning to cut as many as 30,000 corporate jobs beginning on Tuesday, as the company works to pare expenses and compensate for overhiring during the peak demand of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to three people familiar with the matter.

The figure represents a small percentage of Amazon’s 1.55 million total employees, but nearly 10 per cent of the company’s roughly 350,000 corporate employees. This would represent the largest job cut at Amazon since around 27,000 jobs were eliminated starting in late 2022.

An Amazon spokesperson declined to comment.

Amazon has been trimming smaller numbers of jobs over the past two years across multiple divisions, including devices, communications, podcasting and others. The cuts beginning this week may impact a variety of divisions within Amazon, including human resources, known as People Experience and Technology, devices and services and operations, among others, the people said.

Managers of impacted teams were asked to undergo training on Monday for how to communicate with staff following email notifications that will start going out on Tuesday morning, the people said.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy is undertaking an initiative to reduce what he has described as an excess of bureaucracy at the company, including by reducing the number of managers. He installed an anonymous complaint line for identifying inefficiencies that has elicited some 1,500 responses and over 450 process changes, he said earlier this year.

 Andy Jassy, Amazon president and CEO, attends the premiere of "The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power" at The Culver Studios on Monday, Aug. 15, 2022, in Culver City, Calif. (Photo by Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP, File)

Jassy said in June that the increased use of artificial intelligence tools would likely lead to further job cuts, particularly through automating repetitive and routine tasks.

“This latest move signals that Amazon is likely realizing enough AI-driven productivity gains within corporate teams to support a substantial reduction in force,” said Sky Canaves, an eMarketer analyst. “Amazon has also been under pressure in the short-term to offset the long-term investments in building out its AI infrastructure.”

The full scope of this round of job cuts was not immediately clear. The people familiar with the matter said the number could change over time, as Amazon’s financial priorities shift. Fortune earlier reported that the human resources division could be targeted with a cut of roughly 15 per cent.

Layoffs.fyi, a website tracking tech job cuts, estimated that about 98,000 jobs have been lost so far this year among 216 companies. For all of 2024, the figure was 153,000.

Amazon’s largest profit center, cloud computing unit Amazon Web Services, reported sales in the second quarter of US$30.9 billion, a 17.5 per cent increase that was well below the sales gains for Microsoft’s Azure and Google Cloud, which gained 39 per cent and 32 per cent, respectively. Google Cloud is owned by Alphabet.

Estimates indicate that AWS will have boosted third-quarter sales by about 18 per cent to $32 billion, a slight slowdown from last year’s 19 per cent increase. AWS is still reeling from a roughly 15-hour internet outage last week that felled many of the most popular online services, like Snapchat and Venmo.

Indications are that Amazon is expecting another big holiday selling season. The company said it plans to offer 250,000 seasonal jobs to help staff warehouses, among other needs, the same as in the prior two years.

Amazon shares were up 1.3 per cent at $227.11 near the close of trading on Monday. The company plans to report third-quarter earnings on Thursday.


Greg Bensinger, Reuters

 

Doctors and nurses are better than AI at triaging patients

European Society for Emergency Medicine (EUSEM)

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Dr Renata Jukneviciene

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Credit: Dr Renata Jukneviciene

Vienna, Austria: Doctors and nurses are better at triaging patients in emergency departments than artificial intelligence (AI), according to research presented at the European Emergency Medicine Congress today (Tuesday) [1].

However, Dr Renata Jukneviciene, a postdoctoral researcher at Vilnius University, Lithuania, who presented the study, said that AI could be useful when used in conjunction with clinical staff, but should not be used as a stand-alone triage tool.

“We conducted this study to address the growing issue of overcrowding in the emergency department and the escalating workload of nurses,” said Dr Jukneviciene. “Given the rapid development of AI tools like ChatGPT, we aimed to explore whether AI could support triage decision-making, improve efficiency and reduce the burden on staff in emergency settings.”

The researchers distributed a paper and digital questionnaire to six emergency medicine doctors and 51 nurses working in the emergency department of Vilnius University Hospital Santaros Klinikos. They asked them to triage clinical cases selected randomly from 110 reports cited in the PubMed database on the internet. The clinical staff were required to classify the patients according to urgency, placing them in one of five categories from most to least urgent, using the Manchester Triage System. The same cases were analysed by ChatGPT (version 3.5).

A total of 44 nurses (86.3%) and six doctors (100%) completed the questionnaire.

“Overall, AI underperformed compared to both nurses and doctors across most of the metrics we measured,” said Dr Jukneviciene. “For example, AI’s overall accuracy was 50.4%, compared to 65.5% for nurses and 70.6% for doctors. Sensitivity – how well it identified true urgent cases – for AI was also lower at 58.3% compared to nurses, who scored 73.8%, and doctors, who scored 83.0%.”

Doctors had the highest scores in all the areas and categories of urgency that the researchers analysed.

“However, AI did outperform nurses in the first triage category, which are the most urgent cases; it showed better accuracy and specificity, meaning that it identified the truly life-threatening cases. For accuracy, AI scored 27.3% compared to 9.3% for nurses, and for the specificity AI scored 27.8% versus 8.3%.”

The distribution of cases across the five categories of urgency was as follows:

	1 Most urgent	2	3	3	5 Least urgent
Doctors	9%	21%	29%	23%	18%
Nurses	9%	15%	35%	35%	6%
AI	29%	24%	43%	3%	1%

 

“These results suggest that while AI generally tends to over-triage, it may be somewhat more cautious in flagging critical cases, which can be both a strength and a drawback,” said Dr Jukneviciene.

Doctors also performed better than AI when considering cases that required or involved surgery, and in cases that required treatment with medication or other non-invasive therapies. For surgical cases, doctors scored 68.4%, nurses scored 63.% and AI scored 39.5% for reliability. For therapeutic cases, doctors scored 65.9%, nurses scored 44.5% and AI did better than nurses, scoring 51.9% for reliability.

“While we anticipated that AI might not outperform experienced clinicians and nurses, we were surprised that in some areas AI performed quite well. In fact, in the most urgent triage category, it demonstrated higher accuracy than nurses. This indicates that AI should not replace clinical judgement, but could serve as a decision-support tool in specific clinical contexts and in overwhelmed emergency departments.

“AI may assist in prioritising the most urgent cases more consistently and in supporting new or less experienced staff. However, excessive triaging could lead to inefficiencies, so careful integration and human oversight are crucial. Hospitals should approach AI implementation with caution and focus on training staff to critically interpret AI suggestions,” concluded Dr Jukneviciene.

The researchers are planning follow-up studies using newer versions of AI and AI models that are fine-tuned for medical purposes. They want to test them in larger groups of participants, include ECG interpretation, and explore how AI can be integrated into nurse training, specifically for triage and incidents involving mass casualties.

Limitations of the study include its small numbers, that it took place in a single centre, and that the AI analysis took place outside a real-time hospital setting, so it was not possible to assess how it could be used in the daily workflow; nor was it possible to interact with patients, assess vital signs and have follow-up data. In addition, ChatGPT 3.5 was not trained specifically for medical use.

Strengths of the study were that it used real clinical cases for comparison by a multidisciplinary group of doctors and nurses, as well as AI; its accessibility and flexibility was increased by distributing the questionnaire digitally and on paper; it was clinically relevant to current healthcare challenges such as overcrowding and staff shortages in the emergency department; and the study identified that AI over-triages many patients, assigning higher urgency to them, which is crucial knowledge for the safe implementation of AI in emergency departments.

Dr Barbra Backus is chair of the EUSEM abstract selection committee. She is an emergency physician in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, and was not involved in the study. She said: “AI has the potential to be a useful tool for many aspects of medical care and it is already proving its worth in areas such as interpreting x-rays. However, it has its limitations, and this study shows very clearly that it cannot replace trained medical staff for triaging patients coming in to emergency departments. This does not mean it should not be used, as it could aid in speeding up decision-making. However, it needs to be applied with caution and with oversight from doctors and nurses. I expect AI will improve in the future, but should be tested at every stage of development.”

On Monday 29 September, a colleague of Dr Jukneviciene’s, assistant professor Rakesh Jalali, from the University of Warmia and Mazury (Olsztyn, Poland), gave a presentation at the congress on the use of virtual reality to train clinical staff how to treat patients who have been subject to multiple traumatic injuries [2].

(ends)

[1] Abstract no: OA008, “Patient triaging in the ED: can artificial intelligence become the gold standard?” by Renata Jukneviciene, AI/Innovations session, Tuesday 30 September, 16:45-18:15 hrs CEST, Schubert 5 room: https://eusem.floq.live/kiosk/eusem-2025/dailyprogramme?objectClass=timeslot&objectId=68871e9e626af251d24be41d&type=detail

[2] ‘Enhancing medical simulation training: multicenter MedEd polytrauma VR project’, by Rakesh Jalali, Multinational-multicentric research projects in 2025 session, Monday 29 September, 16:45-18:15 hrs CEST, Strauss 1 room: https://eusem.floq.live/kiosk/eusem-2025/dailyprogramme?objectClass=timeslot&objectId=684ac10b86142240f858937a&type=detail

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Method of Research

Survey

Subject of Research

People

Article Title

Patient triaging in the ED: can artificial intelligence become the gold standard?

Article Publication Date

30-Sep-2025

Emergency medicine workers report job satisfaction, though burnout and staff retention remain major problems

European Society for Emergency Medicine (EUSEM)

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Vienna, Austria: One of the largest international surveys into job satisfaction among emergency department workers has revealed that while the majority found their work satisfying and rewarding, there are still many areas where improvements are needed, according to research presented at the European Emergency Medicine Congress today (Sunday) [1]. The paper, “Global Job Satisfaction Among Emergency Medicine Professionals: Results from the 2025 Emergency Medicine Day Survey”, is published today in the European Journal of Emergency Medicine. [2]

The survey, conducted by the EUSEM Emergency Medicine Day Working Group, received responses from 1,112 healthcare providers in 79 countries, and represents one of the largest and most comprehensive global assessments of emergency medicine (EM) workforce well-being to date. EM professionals face persistent challenges including excessive workloads, high pressure, shift/night work and emotional stress. While job satisfaction is essential for workforce sustainability, quality of patient care and staff retention, international data on this topic remain limited.

The average satisfaction score among participants was 25.37 out of 36 and reflected a generally positive sentiment, but Professor Luis Garcia-Castrillo from the Marquès de Valdecilla University Hospital, University of Cantabira, Santander, Spain, says career development opportunities, work organisation, and workload received relatively low scores.

“These are areas where action is needed urgently if specialist staff are to be retained and new team members recruited,” he says.

EM professionals working in high-volume emergency departments that received more than 100,000 visits a year reported significantly lower job satisfaction, as did those in mid-career with between five- and 20-years’ experience. While satisfaction did not vary significantly by gender, academic role, or hospital type, the survey highlights that nurses and paramedics reported higher satisfaction levels than physicians, particularly in workload and organisational aspects.

“Co-worker support, organisational commitment, and professional fulfilment were the most positively-rated factors. We also found that respondents intending to stay in their current role over the next year had significantly higher satisfaction scores, and this emphasises the important link between well-being and staff retention,” says Prof Castrillo.

“The very nature of EM means that it places high demands on staff, but we have shown that with professional support, good team work and a sense of purpose, such demands do not inhibit their enthusiasm for their work. But we cannot emphasise enough that strategies are needed to strengthen leadership, support mid-career staff, improve work-life balance and create clear professional growth opportunities. There are urgent red flags around the incidence of burnout, especially in departments with a very high patient demands,” says the paper’s first author, Professor Roberta Petrino, from the Ente Ospedaliere Cantonale, Lugano, Switzerland.

The team plans to publish additional findings and to conduct further analyses of the data, including differences between countries and systems.

Emergency Medicine Working Group Chair, Dr Basak Yilmaz, from the Emergency Medical Services of Burdur Provincial Health Directorate, Burdur, Turkiye, says: “Our data are already sufficient to be useful to local and national EM bodies as a benchmark for improving staff retention and care quality. One of our most striking findings is the strong correlation between job satisfaction and professional retention. This is important, not just for individual staff members, but also for the sustainability of the EM system as a whole.”

(ends)

[1] “Emergency Medicine is a happy journey: the results of a global survey”, Emergency Medicine Day session, Sunday 28 September, 16:30 - 18:00 hrs CEST, Strauss rooms 2+3.

[2] DOI: 10.1097/MEJ.0000000000001272

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Journal

European Journal of Emergency Medicine

DOI

10.1097/MEJ.0000000000001272 

Method of Research

Survey

Subject of Research

People

Article Title

Emergency Medicine is a happy journey: the results of a global survey

Article Publication Date

28-Sep-2025

From Skechers to Foot Locker: Tariff chaos spurs record-high footwear, apparel deals

By Reuters
 September 18, 2025

Nike products appear on display at the SIX:02 shop inside Foot Locker's redesigned Manhattan flagship store in New York. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer, File)

U.S. President Donald Trump’s trade war is helping to push U.S. clothing and footwear acquisitions to all-time highs this year, with some companies merging to help offset tariff costs while others go private to weather the next 3-1/2 years of his presidency outside of the public market, dealmakers say.

Popular sneaker company Skechers announced a US$9.42 billion deal in early May to go private days after it pulled its annual earnings forecasts and sent a letter, along with 75 other footwear companies, telling Trump the tariffs were an “existential threat” to the industry.

Sneaker seller Foot Locker, which also signed the letter to Trump, in May accelerated its US$2.4 billion sale to Dick’s Sporting Goods.Trade War coverage on BNNBloomberg.ca

While both deals were in the works for months, bankers and analysts said Trump’s tariffs are creating both chaos and opportunity for retailers and brands for some tie-ups.

It has driven dealmaking in the U.S. footwear and apparel sectors to roughly US$21 billion in deals announced year-to-date.


With more than three months left in the year, that figure is already a record, according to LSEG data dating to the 1970s, and particularly surprising for an industry where valuations are not nearly as lofty as, say tech or financial services.

The previous record for U.S. apparel and footwear M&A was last year’s US$16.1 billion in deals, and before that, 2021 with US$15.6 billion, according to LSEG.

“Scale is more important in a tariff-rich environment because you can negotiate better terms across a larger base with many of your counterparties,” said Carmen Molinos, Morgan Stanley’s global co-head of consumer retail investment banking.

Morgan Stanley advised Canadian apparel maker Gildan Activewear on its deal last month to buy U.S. underwear maker Hanesbrands for US$2.2 billion.

Both companies produce more in Central America and the Caribbean than in Asia, and mostly use U.S.-grown cotton, giving them some protection from tariffs. The combination insulates them more from fluctuating geopolitics, and Gildan was one company looking to get bigger amid the chaos.

“We think that we’re really well aligned to take advantage, actually, of this near-shoring opportunity,” Gildan’s CEO and co-founder Glenn Chamandy said on an August investor call about the deal.

Tariffs were a shock to the system that showed retailers just how quickly their businesses can get disrupted and highlighted the importance of scale, several bankers said.

“In moments of turmoil and change, those who are in a position of strength are looking to build up on those strengths and if they see the right strategic fit, they’re taking advantage (and buying),” said JPMorgan’s Jonathan Dunlop, co-head of North America consumer & retail investment banking.

This year, JPMorgan advised 3G Capital for Skechers and brand management firm Authentic Brand Group’s US$1.4 billion deallast month for Guess.

Authentic also picked up Dockers from Levi Strauss, while another brand management firm Bluestar Alliance announced a deal to buy Dickies from VF Corp this week.


Brand management firms typically buy a brand’s IP and then license it to operating partners that have the manufacturing, design and sales responsibilities.

“The brand management companies have been some of the most prolific acquirers of both middle market and a handful of multi-billion dollar retail brands,” said David Shiffman, partner and head of Consumer Retail at Solomon Partners. The bank advised the special committee of Guess.

Navigating the uncertainty

Going private, like in Skechers’ case, is becoming an increasingly attractive option to navigate the uncertainty without the pressure of public quarterly reporting, especially if companies feel the public market is not valuing them appropriately.

Foot Locker, meanwhile, had been in discussions about a sale since Dick’s Executive Chairman Edward Stack first reached out to rival CEO Mary Dillon in January 2024.

Trump’s April 2 self-styled “Liberation Day,” when he announced sweeping new global tariffs, helped seal the deal a bit earlier than expected, according to an SEC filing.

Foot Locker said tariffs were causing the company’s stock to drop and it was headed for a weaker-than-expected first-quarter earnings report that executives worried would further drive down its shares.

The board decided on May 10 to try to bring “negotiations to a close quickly,” it said in a securities filing. The next four days were a flurry of paperwork and legal meetings before the companies announced their deal – with two weeks to spare before reporting earnings.

Bankers say to watch for more tie-ups later this year as stronger retailers look for more deals and more struggling companies look for partners.

Private equity firm Bain Capital is trying to offload its stake in Canada Goose and Lands’ End has received offers from brand management firms.

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Reporting by Abigail Summerville in New YorkEditing by Marguerita Choy

Chicago Hospital’s Closure Is a Canary in Coal Mine for Corporatized Health Care

SOCIALIZE  IT UNDER WORKERS CONTROL

The August shuttering of Weiss Memorial Hospital is just the latest casualty of private equity-backed hospital closures.

By Anna Romina Guevarra & Gayatri Reddy , 

Truthout

September 8, 2025

Weiss Memorial Hospital in Chicago, Illinois, United States, on October 16, 2022.Beata Zawrzel / NurPhoto via Getty Images

Predictably, Weiss Memorial Hospital, which has served the diverse and vulnerable populations of the northside Chicago neighborhood of Uptown for decades, closed its doors on August 8, 2025. Weiss Memorial Hospital was the first (and only) community safety-net hospital (a hospital whose stated mission is to serve low-income communities) in this neighborhood. The hospital closed despite impassioned pleas by several residents such as Phong Nguyen, a Vietnamese refugee and war veteran who has lived in Uptown and used Weiss Memorial for 50 years. As he told WBEZ, “I am over 80 years old this year. Not just my generation, but generations following myself still rely on this hospital for critical services; [Weiss is] a hospital that allows us to stay in the area and maintain the quality of life that we deserve.”

Weiss Memorial Hospital is the latest victim of disinvestment from public funding in safety-net hospitals. That process that has only been exacerbated by the national defunding of Medicare and Medicaid currently underway through the massive budget bill passed by Congress this year, leaving hundreds of hospitals in a state of precarity. That such safety-net hospitals are often disproportionately located in low-income communities and neighborhoods of color only furthers the crisis of health care, especially for vulnerable low-income, immigrant, and refugee populations who often lose access to care as a result.

Between 2010 and 2023, more hospitals closed than opened in the United States, with rural closures outpacing their urban counterparts. More than 300 rural hospitals across the country are in imminent danger of closure, with 400 others — an astounding one-third of all rural hospitals — at high risk of closing in the near future. The upcoming cuts to Medicaid funding will only heighten this health care crisis. But these cuts are only the latest form of disinvestment in community safety-net hospitals in both rural and urban areas.

Privatization of hospitals (and other public resources) has been one of the ways this process has manifested ever since the rise of free-market fundamentalist policies in the 1980s. Back then, a number of public hospitals were converted to private ownership and continue to be run as for-profit entities to this day. In recent years, these hospitals are increasingly operated by private equity firms. As of 2025, the American Hospital Association estimates that approximately 1,214 — or almost one-quarter of the 5,112 community hospitals in the U.S. — are owned by a for-profit entity, of which an estimated 460 (as of 2022 data) are owned by private equity firms, a 25-fold increase over the last two decades. The nonprofit watchdog Private Equity Stakeholder Project (PESP) reports in 2025 that almost 9 percent of private hospitals and nearly 23 percent of for-profit hospitals are owned by a few private equity firms. Given their overarching focus on maximizing profits and the lack of transparency in their decision-making processes, private for-profit ownership of hospitals has been associated with diminished quality of care, increased costs for patients, and eventually, bankruptcies and hospital closures. Private equity ownership of hospitals and health care has been described as “capitalism on steroids” by John McDonough, a Harvard University public health professor. As McDonough elaborates, private equity firms “seek returns on their investment as high as possible as quickly as possible, then rush to sell off that investment and go on to their next conquest.”

This pattern was evident in the well-documented 2024 bankruptcy and collapse of Steward Health Care, which at one point owned more than 30 hospitals across eight U.S. states. While Illinois was not one of these states, neither the state nor its largest city, Chicago, has been immune to this growing corporatization of health care in the U.S.

Related Story

Private Equity Firms Tighten Stranglehold on US, Angling for Boons Under Trump
Private equity has fingers in our homes, hospitals and jobs. Resisting it is crucial to our fight for a just society. By Derek Seidman , Truthout March 1, 2025

In Chicago alone, a number of public and not-for-profit hospitals were either closed outright or converted to for-profit and private equity-owned hospitals after the early 1980s. Many have shuttered their doors since then. In 1987, Provident Hospital, the first Black-run public hospital in Chicago, closed, followed by a not-for-profit community hospital, Hospital of Englewood in 1988. In 2000, Doctors Hospital of Hyde Park closed and in 2008, it was the turn of the Michael Reese Hospital. The 170-year-old Mercy Hospital, the oldest chartered not-for-profit hospital in Chicago, would have closed in 2021 were it not for the advocacy of community organizers representing the Chicago Health Equity Coalition. Their active intervention led a state review board to reject proposals for its closure and agree to the sale of the hospital to another entity, Insight Chicago, a not-for-profit hospital system.

This pattern — of disinvestment, precarity, and eventual closure — is particularly evident in hospitals that have been taken over by private equity firms. Recent examples include Westlake Hospital, which was closed by the private equity-backed hospital chain, Pipeline Health, in 2019 (it was reopened in 2021, but only after Pipeline was sued by the Village of Melrose Park). Other examples are the two Chicago hospitals that belonged to the Kindred Hospitals group. These two hospitals were run by ScionHealth, a health care system which in turn is owned by a private equity firm Apollo Global Management. Kindred Hospital Lakeshore in Chicago and Kindred Hospital Sycamore closed their doors in 2025. The closure of Weiss Memorial Hospital in Uptown Chicago is just the latest chapter in this sordid story of private equity-backed hospital closures.

Weiss Memorial Hospital was built through the largesse of Louis A. Weiss, a local businessman who bequeathed a large sum upon his death in 1949, with the stipulation that it serve the residents of Chicago’s northside, where he flourished. The Weiss family worked in partnership with the Strauss Surgical Group to co-found the hospital, which officially opened in 1953. Weiss Memorial Hospital was the first nonprofit community hospital to be built in Chicago in 25 years at that point. Following its mission to provide accessible health care to diverse and vulnerable communities, Weiss Memorial Hospital continued to innovate and serve the residents of Uptown, a neighborhood that had long served as a portal for displaced immigrants who were often intentionally segregated. In 1987, the hospital became affiliated with the University of Chicago Hospitals and Health System (UCHHS), giving Weiss’s patients access to many UCHHS clinical programs.

In 2002, however, UCHHS partnered with Vanguard Health Systems to acquire Weiss Memorial Hospital in a 20/80 partnership, with Vanguard being the majority stakeholder. While this partnership allowed Weiss to expand its emergency and intensive care units and acquire new infrastructure and technology, especially in the field of cancer treatment, it signaled the pathway for the hospital’s eventual demise. In 2013, Weiss was acquired by Tenet Healthcare Corporation, which promptly sold Weiss Memorial Hospital (along with Westlake Hospital and West Suburban Medical Center) to Pipeline Health in 2019. As noted, Pipeline Health, based out of California, is another private equity-backed hospital chain. Incidentally, Pipeline Health was the subject of a PESP report which outlined the extractive financial strategies that have led to the precarity and destabilization of hospitals such as Westlake and West Suburban in Chicago.

Pipeline Health ended up closing Westlake Hospital and selling West Suburban and Weiss Memorial to another private equity firm, Resilience Healthcare, the current owner of these hospitals. As the PESP report documents, the sale of the Weiss and West Suburban hospitals to Resilience Healthcare was structured in a way that split the operations and the land: Resilience Healthcare purchased the operations for $1 and the real estate was sold for $92 million to an affiliated but separate company, Ramco Healthcare Holdings, LLC, in 2022. Resilience Healthcare subsequently closed Weiss on August 8, 2025, and West Suburban Medical Center is in imminent danger of closure.

In short, the story of Weiss Memorial Hospital is a classic illustration of the corporatization of health care and the disadvantages of private equity acquisition of hospitals — always to the detriment of the public, especially vulnerable poor and communities of color. As Lilly Le, a community organizer from the Vietnamese Association of Illinois reiterated to NBC Chicago, the closure of Weiss is “part of a longstanding pattern of disinvestment” in communities like Uptown

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The Rise Uptown encampment on the Weiss Hospital parking lot is pictured on August 27, 2022.Anna Romina Guevarra

In 2021, community residents and activists, including the authors of this article, sounded the alarm when Weiss’s former owner, Pipeline Health, sold the Weiss Memorial Hospital parking lot to Lincoln Property Company, a real estate company, to build luxury housing. The rezoning and eventual sale of this land occurred despite vociferous protests, including an encampment by the community and opposition that included the zoning advisory board of the ward where the land is located. As community activists predicted — presciently, as it turned out — the sale of the parking lot, although it pre-dated the ownership of the hospital by Resilience Healthcare, was merely the first step in the eventual dismantling and closure of the hospital.

After taking over Weiss, Dr. Manoj Prasad, the CEO of Resilience Healthcare, said in 2023: “I’m of the belief that there should be no hospital in our country getting shut down because of financial reasons … I have no intentions of going anywhere … These two hospitals [Weiss Memorial and West Suburban], they will flourish.” He repeated this sentiment at a press conference on the day he closed Weiss. But clearly, the writing was already on the wall when the parking lot was sold in 2021.

Over the last several months, Resilience Healthcare has come under fire for repeated instances of managerial failure. In June, the hospital’s air conditioning failed, forcing administrators to transfer patients and halt medical procedures. “This is a 73-year-old building and many of our previous owners decided to kick the can down the road,” Prasad said during a press conference at the time. “A lot of upgrades that should have happened to our HVAC system, unfortunately did not happen.” Soon after, state investigators found that the hospital had created a makeshift emergency department in an office building without proper equipment. Prasad attempted to justify this by saying that the findings were untrue, that the makeshift department was properly equipped, and that he received approval from the health department to relocate the department.

Even prior to these failures, the hospital’s physical environment had already been a concern for the Illinois Department of Public Health following a series of inspections between November 2024 to July 2025. These inspections resulted in the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) ultimately issuing a notice that it would end Medicare payments to Weiss Hospital effective August 9, citing non-compliance in multiple areas: nursing services, physical environment, and emergency services. Resilience Healthcare was informed about the deadline on June 4 following multiple inspections from the Illinois Department of Public Health and had ample time to make the necessary infrastructural improvements, or work with local elected officials to buy needed time. The company instead closed the hospital effective August 8, one day ahead of the CMS deadline. As 46th Ward Alderwoman Angela Clay noted, “This closure is not just a health care crisis — it is the result of avoidable mismanagement and yet another example of how private equity firms profit off the backs of working-class communities, even at the expense of their health and well-being.”

To address the most pressing need — to keep the hospital open and allow it to serve vulnerable populations — local alderpersons and state lawmakers serving this neighborhood signed a letter calling on CMS for an eight-week extension of Medicare funding for the hospital. To be sure, while this might be an important first step given the urgency of keeping the hospital accessible to patients, reopening Weiss under the same management and leaving intact the ownership by Resilience Healthcare, a private equity firm, may not be the best long-term solution.

So, where do we go from here? Following the community organizing and legal pathways opened by the Chicago communities impacted by the Westlake Hospital closure and the near-closure of Mercy Hospital (thanks to the #SaveMercy campaign by the Chicago Health Equity Coalition) is one immediate option. Another more long-term option is to turn Weiss Memorial Hospital into a public hospital under the umbrella of a nonprofit entity or Cook County’s hospital system — a proposal supported by community organizers who took part in the earlier campaign to stop the building of luxury developments on the hospital’s parking lot.

If there is one lesson to be learned from the story of the private equity acquisition of hospitals, it is that there is a fundamental contradiction at the heart of this endeavor: While communities expect these entities to prioritize their interests over profits, as corporate entities, private equity firms are set up to prioritize profits. Invariably, the path of private equity ownership seems to end with hospital precarity or closure. If the vulnerable populations served by a safety-net hospital such as Weiss are to be served, why not circumvent this process and convert hospitals such as Weiss to public hospitals operated by the county, or at least by a nonprofit entity such as a university?

In short, make Weiss Memorial Hospital a people’s hospital. Otherwise, we will just continue to witness more disinvestment in safety-net and community hospitals, and more hospital closures. As Marc Kaplan, an organizer for Northside Action for Justice, one of the core members of the coalition to save Weiss along with ONE Northside and the Vietnamese Association of Illinois, warned, “This is really the canary in the coal mine, so to speak. [Such closures] are going to happen to hospitals all around the city and the country … This is a real disaster we’re looking at here.”

We have a chance to avert such disasters by planning long-term. Let’s take that chance.


This article is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), and you are free to share and republish under the terms of the license.

Anna Romina Guevarra is the founding director and professor of Global Asian Studies at the University of Illinois Chicago and a former Public Voices fellow of the OpEd Project. She is an award-winning author on race, labor and migration, and an expert witness on asylum cases. She co-founded the project: Dis-Placements: A People’s History of Uptown, Chicago. Follow her on X: @AnnaRGuevarra.

Gayatri Reddy is an associate professor of Gender & Women’s Studies and Anthropology at the University of Illinois Chicago and former Public Voices fellow of the OpEd Project. She is an award-winning scholar and author on race, gender, sexuality, health and an expert witness on asylum cases. She co-founded the project: Dis-Placements: A People’s History of Uptown, Chicago. Follow her on X: @BigG_ji.