 I don't know. I don't know. I'm grown and own. Okay. 23 to the hour. Please welcome to the office when program. I can suck meridian health. The co CEOs of that organization. Bob Garrett and John Lloyd. Good morning, guys. Good morning, Don. How you doing? I'm fine. How are you? We're doing great. Hey, what a great day. We're on I miss in the morning and we're getting a new governor in the state of New Jersey. How about the raising the taxes on the state of New Jersey? I don't know either. We'll see. Anyway, let me show you, Mr. Garrett. How does the co CEO thing work on? It's it's working out. It's working out well. So, uh, so John and I are co CEOs for two and a half years. And when the merger was contemplated, both our boards felt strongly that they wanted their CEO to be the CEO of the new entity. So we worked out a, um, an arrangement where for two and a half years, we were planning to retire after the two and a half years, and then it be, you know, from that point, it's it's the plan for for me to become the sole CEO. But honestly, it could not have worked out better. We have different different strengths. We we compliment each other. I think really nicely. It is unique. You know, the textbooks will tell you co CEOs that you know, they'll kill each other. It won't work. But in our case, it really has. It's been a tough, uh, we're, uh, yeah, we're 19 months into it. So we have, I think, another not another 11 months or so. Don just add to that. Um, as Bob said, we've known each other for about 30 years. We both were in New Jersey, and we both respected each other. It's really worked much better than we anticipated. As Bob said, we have different strengths and that's one of the most important things. And also we respect each other. So it's really important to go behind go behind closed doors and always resolve it. So believe it or not, it works really well. One of the nicer people not to patronizing, but one of the nicer people I've ever met my life is Bob Garrett for a lot of reasons, personal and professional. I thank you. Absolutely. I agree with you 100%. So now you're not that John Lloyd was married to Chris everywhere. I was average, but a lot of fun. Did you play professionally? Not at all. No, okay. So what's going on? I can start with you, John. Well, just a lot of things are very, very exciting. I think most recently we announced the merger with JFK and Edison. That's a great addition to our network. We now have 16 hospitals in the network. And you know, a lot of people say you're getting larger, and it's really not about being larger. It's really about having access for our patients to access our services. And so right now we're in about seven or eight counties in New Jersey, and we're able to have great coverage. I have a fairly dumb question, Bob, but what does it mean to me as a patient that Hackensack, for example, is affiliated with all these other hospitals? Well, what it means to patients in our area is better access to quality care, because we now have 16 hospitals. So what we're trying to do is make sure all of our hospitals are at, you know, the highest level of quality, and as you know, Don, Hackensack University Medical Center has been number one for many, many years, ranked by different organizations. So there's, you know, a great deal of sharing best practices. In addition to that, we're in over 160 ambulatory locations throughout New Jersey, and we directly serve two-thirds of the population of New Jersey. So you could access quality care, whether, you know, you're an inpatient in a hospital or in an ambulatory surgery center or an urgent care center or in one of our nursing homes. So it really means, you know, being comprehensive and providing the best access to care. From a Merge system like Hackensack Meridian Health. Don, if I could add to that, back in the late 80s after becoming the CEO of Jersey-Sharon University Medical Center, I wondered why we made patients travel to our hospitals for ambulatory services. And it just made no sense to me. So in the late 80s and early 90s, we started to build what we call our continuum of care. And these are all the ambulatory facilities. These are not physicians' offices, but ambulatory facilities. And it's worked out really, really well. What do you mean by ambulatory facility? Well, they would be things like convenient care, urgent care, home care, surgery centers, rehab. Those are just to name a few. And one that we're very proud of is the health village of Jackson in the Monmouth and Ocean County. That's actually in Ocean County. And that is a 150,000 square foot one-stop shopping for all your health care needs. And, Don, you know, the fact of the matter is that more and more health care is being provided outside the four walls of hospitals. So having a vast ambulatory care network like Hackensack Meridian is really important for us to provide the full array of services to the patients we serve. I'm talking with Robert Garrett and John Lloyd, co-CEO's of Hackensack Meridian Health, about their recent expansion. That's with JFK, right? Yes. So JFK is located centrally in New Jersey, and it really links the northern part of our network with the southern part of our network. And it also adds the 16th hospital to our network. And JFK is really well known for their academics, but they're also well known for neurosciences and rehabilitation medicine. So for a lot of reasons, it made great sense for us to add JFK to our health network. Well, go ahead, John. Yes, I'd like to give a big shout out to Ray Fredericks. He's the president there. I've known him for close to 30 years. We've had a couple of joint ventures with him. It's a phenomenal organization. The culture there is all about patient care. And that's what we're all about as well. So if you're a patient and something happens to you, how do you know where to go? I mean, what's got me to think about the problem with that question is there's an ambulatory of facilities now. Right, so I mean, what do you do? So you have different options. A lot of patients still have primary care physicians and they'll help to direct patients where to go. We have a clinically integrated network now of over 3,000 physicians that are a part of it. And in total there's over 6,500 physicians affiliated with Hackensack Meridian. But in addition to that if you access a healthcare systems website, there's really directions in terms of where to really access our system, whether it's at an ambulatory surgery center, an urgent care center, or if it's something serious we still obviously want people to come into the emergency room if they're not quite sure what level of care they need. But there are great options now and especially young people more and more are using these ambulatory care facilities, more and more are using what they call telehealth so they have like virtual health visits with physicians. It's just giving patients and consumers more options for healthcare. How's the message to health insurance for most individuals is Obamacare and so on affected just the ability for people to come to one of their facilities. It's John. One of the things I've said from day one even when Obamacare came into existence that if I were in charge I would have done two things. Number one is I would have provided coverage for every resident in this country which I think we should do anyway. And you know that's very, very important. And the second thing I would have done is I would have kept it simple and they make it too complicated I would have done a phase one phase two but right now it's a mess in Washington. We're very concerned about our patients not being able to get coverage and we'll just have to see what else we can do to sort of advocate for them. Yeah and John in New Jersey it's no different than a lot of other states so on the healthcare insurance exchange we've lost a lot of insurance options so consumers patients don't have as many options and the other thing we're really concerned about is when the Affordable Care Act was put in place it expanded Medicaid greatly and in New Jersey we were one of the Medicaid expansion states. If that were to be revoked patients would be uninsured and they would end off unfortunately in our emergency rooms sometimes where they're not needed to be so it's really a big issue and we've been really advocating for reform of the Affordable Care Act but not to necessarily throw out the baby with the bathwater. John and Copian in the meantime kind of was sort of my original question. Yeah we've been doing okay and what we do we have a service at Hackensack Meridian where we help people find insurance plans so people can call our offices, our billing offices and our insurance offices and they can be assisted in trying to enroll either in Medicaid or in other private insurance plans so we've been coping but the uncertainty not knowing what's going to happen with the Affordable Care Act what's going to happen to the Medicaid expansion really makes it difficult to plan for the future. Don just add to that we take every patient who comes to our facilities and that's our commitment as a not-for-profit and we take care of every patient who comes to us. I'd like to take this opportunity by the way to thank you for your sponsorship and your decision sponsored by Hackensack Meridian Health. We just saw we just got a little tour of it and I'll tell you what there's more branding and logos here than there are at our hospitals Don. Well we have a very energetic enthusiastic proactive sales staff so Well congratulations to both of you I mean I had visions of before you became honest this morning we're trying to drive a wedge between the two of you so that we'd have a Texas so death match but it sounded like a really a wonderfully working relationship but maybe I can get it out and of course the expansion of Hackensack has been I've been sitting here watching it for the past 40 years really a remarkable job going back to John Ferguson and now you guys so congratulations Thank you Don and thank you for all your support for many many years as I think a lot of your listeners know Deirdre Imus is still very involved in the Environmental Health Center and I just had a conference call with her a few weeks ago we're going to focus on a whole new initiative for environmental health research so she's been a great advocate and we really appreciate both of your support I see her on the phone every single day with the people at her center running out so Don I want to congratulate you and Deirdre and to Deirdre go Villanova my son is there now okay alright well thanks you guys thank you very much John Lloyd Co-CEO Hackensack Meridian Health Battle of the Bands come on up nearly 10 minutes now until they are