- Ted, welcome back.

Let's start with some big news from Lifespan, of course the owners of Rhode Island Hospital and Hasbro Children's Hospital among others.

Lifespan recently announced major layoffs at the senior level.

- Yeah, a big set of layoffs, Michelle.

20% of executives at Lifespan were let go here in September.

It was a dramatic shakeup by John Fernandez who's the CEO.

He's been the CEO for about two years now since they brought him down to Lifespan from Mass.

Eye and Ear in Boston.

He says it was driven by concerns about too much overhead at Lifespan as well as the financial challenges that we've talked about on this segment before, Michelle.

Lifespan has been barely breaking even for a number of years, and they're about to close their current fiscal year, and, as of June 30th, their base hospital operations were running about $70 million in the red.

So they're looking for ways to save money, and these executive layoffs are supposed to save them about $6 million next year.

- And, Ted, the timing is interesting because, a few months ago, you and I were talking about how Lifespan is rebranding itself as Brown University Health and deepening its relationship with the university.

So clearly there are a lot of changes happening at Lifespan.

- Yeah, it feels like a big transition period for Lifespan, I would say, Michelle.

They're expanding into Southeastern Massachusetts.

They're close to closing on a transaction where they're gonna buy Saint Anne's Hospital in Fall River and Morton Hospital in Taunton.

They don't currently own any hospitals outside of Rhode Island.

That's set to close in October, and the executives hope it'll help strengthen their finances overall.

And then they're also in the final stages, as you said, of planning this transformation into Brown University Health.

And actually just learned shortly before this taping that they're planning to launch that rebrand on October 15th.

So people will start to see the hospital signage change and all that over to Brown Health.

- Yeah, let's switch gears now to one of the state's largest broadband providers, Cox Communications, which is suing Governor McKee's administration over a major federal grant.

What are they claiming here?

- So this involves $108 million of federal money.

It was money from the bipartisan infrastructure law, but it wasn't for roads and bridges.

It was actually for broadband expansion.

And Cox is arguing basically that the McKee administration is planning to duplicate infrastructure that already exists, broadband infrastructure in places that don't need it, and that that's not what Congress intended when they appropriated this money.

They're also arguing that the maps that the administration is basing their sort of survey of how broadband access is across Rhode Island are faulty, and that the data isn't right.

So they have a number of questions about this, but, overall, they just say this plan is wrong.

- And the McKee administration is basically saying that Cox just wants more of this money.

- Yeah, exactly.

They say, well, of course Cox wants more of the $108 million to go to them by subsidizing customers' bills.

The administration says their plans are...

They argue it's perfectly in line with what Congress said you could do with this money, and that they have a plan.

Also, bigger picture, Governor Dan McKee, he was on Channel 12 this week and sort of suggested this is a bit of the normal course of business where big companies looking for a slice of state money try to push back at how it's gonna be handed out.

He pointed out that Blue Cross Blue Shield is currently protesting the next Medicaid contract which is a huge $15 billion contract.

So not that he's saying he's happy about the lawsuit by any means, but also arguing this is something that happens in the normal course of business.

- Yeah, a lot of money at stake in this dispute.

Good to see you, Ted.

- Good to see you.