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U.S. Representative Carolyn McCarthy of New York announced Monday she has "a treatable form" of lung cancer.

"A treatment plan will begin soon, and I look forward to its successful completion," the nine-term Democrat from Long Island said in a statement that asked for privacy "while I undergo my treatment."

Ms. McCarthy, 69, said she will be treated at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York and will be absent from the House of Representatives during that time.

"I am a fighter, as many people know, and I am committed to beating this latest challenge in my life," she said.

A nurse before her election to the House in 1996, McCarthy has been one of Congress's staunchest supporters of gun control legislation. Her husband was killed and her son was wounded in a mass shooting on the Long Island Rail Road in 1993.

Starbucks customers will soon have to stamp out their cigarettes before approaching the cafes.

The Seattle-based chain says it will start banning smoking within 25 feet of its stores, beginning Saturday, where permitted by its leases.

Starbucks spokeswoman Jaime Lynn Riley says the intent is to expand the indoor no-smoking policy to the outdoor seating areas.

"If there were any concerns, we would hope to resolve it amicably." Riley said, referring to a customer who might be smoking within the restricted area.

The rule will apply to the 7,000 cafes owned and operated by Starbucks Corp., regardless of whether they have outdoor seating areas.

The policy shouldn't cause a big difference in many areas including New York CIty that already ban smoking within a certain distance of a business entrance.

Montefiore Medical Center is buying two more hospitals at fire-sale prices, just months after acquiring bankrupt New York Westchester Square Medical Center. Westchester, N.Y.-based Sound Shore Health System will file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Montefiore announced it will purchase Sound Shore's buildings and other assets, assume certain liabilities and provide funding while Sound Shore is in bankruptcy proceedings. Montefiore plans to keep open and operate Sound Shore's two hospitals in Mount Vernon and New Rochelle, as well as its nursing home.

The proposed transaction needs bankruptcy court and New York state Department of Health approvals. Sound Shore and Montefiore did not disclose financial details of the transaction, which they said could be completed by the end of the year.

In a statement, Montefiore CEO Dr. Steven Safyer said his hospital "looks forward to building on our existing clinical presence in lower Westchester and working with the dedicated doctors, nurses and staff of Sound Shore and Mount Vernon hospitals and the Schaffer Extended Care Center who have served their patients well over many years."

Montefiore already operates nine health clinics in Westchester.

Earlier in May, negotiations between Westchester Medical Center and the Sound Shore Health System broke off after Westchester Medical ended the merger talks.

"Sound Shore appears to have a dramatically different view than WMC about how to best balance resources between investment in improving the Sound Shore/Mount Vernon facilities and the obligations that the Sound Shore System has accumulated over the years," Westchester Medical said in a statement announcing the deal was off.

It added that it was "prepared to dedicate enormous resources to the effort to keep these clinical sites open and upgrade them to better serve New Rochelle, Mount Vernon and the surrounding communities," but would now pursue alternatives to a merger to meet their health care needs.

The Sound Shore system was facing a $3 million to $5 million year-end loss when talks with Westchester Medical began in December.

State University of New York officials Tuesday unveiled a plan to keep their treasured Brooklyn medical school afloat by creating a new integrated health network in the borough.

Financially-strapped SUNY Downstate Medical Center faced a June 1 legislative deadline to submit a sustainability plan to the state health and budget departments, for implementation by June 15.

Downstate's goal has been to preserve its medical school, which SUNY officials said holds a unique position in how it trains minority doctors that tend to stay in New York, and in Brooklyn itself, to practice medicine. To meet that goal, they acknowledged that the school's teaching hospital, University Hospital of Brooklyn, must downsize, and its Long Island College Hospital campus must be jettisoned.

Downstate isn't the only Brooklyn hospital struggling to adapt to a changing health care industry. More health care is being delivered outside of hospitals, in clinics, outpatient centers and doctors' offices, at the same time that health care reforms have brought cuts in state and federal aid.

"We know we're not alone," said Lora Lefebvre, associate vice chancellor for health affairs at SUNY, speaking of the financial pressure on Brooklyn hospitals.

And so SUNY is proposing a new Brooklyn integrated health network. The consortium of academic and clinical providers would collectively negotiate better managed-care reimbursement, collaborate on improving the quality of care while reducing costs. Ms. Lefebvre said the idea of an integrated network was first proposed by the state's Medicaid Redesign Team's Brooklyn task force.

SUNY officials suggested a new way of corralling Brooklyn health care providers to work together. A public benefit corporation would be established to spearhead health initiatives in Brooklyn, including promoting the creation of a clinically-integrated provider network. But the corporation would neither run hospitals or a health network itself.

In the short term, SUNY officials have proposed a two-step plan: first downsize University Hospital, and then restructure operations with hundreds of millions of dollars in state aid.

In the meantime, Downstate will address inefficiencies like rightsizing lengths of stay and improving spotty bill collection. University Hospital "will become smaller," said Ms. Lefebvre, but will not close.

As for LICH, the Cobble Hill hospital that has been the target of a lawsuit aimed at blocking its closure, responses were due on May 24 from entities expressing interest in operating some form of health facility there. Ms. Lefebvre said SUNY received credible responses.

"Some proposals looked great," she said, declining to provide details on the submissions. "I'm cautiously optimistic."

SUNY's sustainability plan includes financial projections related to ending its operation of LICH. The exit plan requires about $129 million in state funding over four fiscal years. Restructuring at University Hospital would require an additional $225 million.

Ms. Lefebvre said, however, that there were no assurances that SUNY will get the state aid. "We were asked to identify what we needed, and we did," she said.

New York State has long hoped that it would get a waiver it requested last August from the federal government to re-invest up to $10 billion in Medicaid savings. But federal officials have not yet granted the request. "Without this waiver, areas throughout New York will face severe consequences," Gov. Andrew Cuomo wrote on May 7 to U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. "Nowhere is the situation more critical than in Brooklyn," where a "rapid deterioration" in the finances of the borough's health system could lead to the closure of at least four hospitals.

An outline of Downstate's sustainability plan is online here.

As a whole, 2012 treated New York pretty well. The city added 76,000 jobs, New York Stock Exchange members posted profits triple 2011 levels and now, according to Crain's research, 71% of the area's top publicly traded companies posted gains in revenue.

At the area's top 250 publicly traded companies, revenue was up 3.7% between 2011 and 2012 to $1.68 trillion—just shy of Canada's gross domestic product—according to research from S&P Capital IQ provided to Crain's. It was led by gains in the financial services sector. Eight of the 15 fastest growing companies on the list—including Apollo Global Management, which posted growth of 1,566.3%, and Leucadia National Corp.—are a part of that industry.

Click here to download the entire list of the largest publicly held companies in the New York area.

If the top publicly held companies in the New York area joined forces as a country, it would rival Canada.

Revenue at the 250 largest publicly held companies was $1.68 trillion in 2012, up 3.7% from a year earlier. The Great White North posted a gross domestic product of $1.77 trillion. Financial service firms accounted for more than a third of the New York figure—or nearly the GDP of Saudi Arabia—according to research S&P Capital IQ provided to Crain's.

Click here to download the entire list of the largest publicly held companies in the New York area.

Johnson & Johnson says it plans to submit more than 10 new treatments to regulators for approval and 25 applications for additional uses of approved drugs by 2017.

The New Brunswick, N.J., company says its pipeline of drugs in late-stage clinical development include a potential hepatitis C treatment being reviewed by regulars, a version of the anti-psychotic Invega designed to last three months and new vaccines for flu, rabies and polio.

Johnson & Johnson makes prescription drugs, consumer health products and medical devices.

It says its pharmaceuticals segment has launched 11 new products since 2009. They made up 17% of total pharmaceutical sales last year, which is up from 9% in 2011. These products include the blood thinner Xarelto, Invega and J&J's first diabetes treatment, Invokana.

Anthony Weiner has a message for the business community: Ignore the scandal, focus on the ideas.

In a 14-minute phone interview with The Insider hours after he formally kicked off his improbable campaign with a video posted online in the dead of night, Mr. Weiner touched on everything from health care to rezoning to project labor agreements, and repeated his request that voters, and especially the business community, look closely at his policy platform before determining whether he has earned a second chance for their support.

"What I'm going to try to say to business interests, to union interests, to citizens on the street, is take a look at the ideas I'm talking about," Mr. Weiner said. "There may be people in New York who would never vote for me again. I even want to have this conversation with them."

Mr. Weiner said he understands that there are some who will only want to discuss his "private failings," a reference to the sexting scandal that pushed him out of office two years ago. Nevertheless, he said he hoped to pivot to a discussion of ideas, many of which touch on the spiraling costs of health care, a subject he spoke about frequently and loudly while in Congress.

He declined to rate Mayor Michael Bloomberg's tenure in office on a scale from 1 to 10, a question that was asked of his fellow Democratic candidates during a debate hosted by Crain's Wednesday morning. (Mr. Weiner apologized for his absence. Bill de Blasio also did not attend.)

He said Mr. Bloomberg had achieved some "laudable" goals while in office, citing the PlaNYC 2030 sustainability plan and his efforts to reduce racial tension in the city. But he contested job growth figures under the mayor, noting that it is a "cause for concern" that so many of the jobs created have been low-wage, low-skill positions.

He said if elected, he would tackle one of the big "existential budgetary problems in the city" and a "big business drag" on the economy: the high cost of health care. The city spends around $14 billion on it, or around 20% of the budget, which Mr. Weiner said was unsustainable.

"I've got a proposal that I'll be fleshing out in the months to come that basically says, 'Look, there's got to be a more efficient way to spend that $14 billion that would drive the health care economy in a more efficient way, and keep more of the revenue generated from the health care economy here in New York City rather than go to someplace else,'" he said. "These are things that haven't been explored much on the campaign trail."

Like the other candidates, Mr. Weiner declined to discuss in detail his position on the expired labor contracts with the city's municipal workforce, but did hint at how he'd approach the approximately $4 billion in retroactive raises sought by the unions.

"I will say this: It is unsustainable and wrong that 90% of city employees pay nothing in health care premiums," he said, echoing a sentiment often expressed by Mr. Bloomberg and fiscal watchdog groups, not to mention some of the Republican mayoral candidates. "I think that needs to change, and it doesn't need to be much."

He added, "I'm going to try to make the case to city workers that right now, every dime that could be used for wages is being eaten up by health care costs, and to some extent pension costs."

He called the city's paid sick leave and living wage laws "good initiatives…in a small-bore way" that may not go far enough in protecting workers.

"I believe it's a laudable objective," he said. "While these bills were not what I would like ideally—I have my own proposals on health care—I think we need to find ways to help care for their children…by giving them reasonable accommodations at work."

Mr. Weiner said he did not object to unions and contractors hashing out project labor agreements on construction projects, but that he did have some worry about the outcome of such agreements.

"I am concerned about the notion that we're having one-off auctions that don't do a good enough job stating what city policy should be," he said. "I think it's perfectly fair and reasonable, in exchange for a public resource like air rights, to say we want certain benefits for the community. I would feel much more comfortable if it was done in an open and transparent way with the city trying to quarterback the thing, rather than have private interests negotiating behind closed doors, and creating a silent auction of activity."

Finally, addressing the massive number of rezonings under Mr. Bloomberg's watch, Mr. Weiner stressed the need for diversity.

"I'm concerned that we rezoned so much during the housing bubble that we left out opportunities for things like light manufacturing and small business jobs that we see move to places like Jersey City," he said. "When you do planning, we can't just be planning for the opportunities we see, we also need to plan for the opportunities we want to see."

He added, "We can't have an economy that's white rice, we have to have one that's Pad Thai—we have to have an economy that has a little bit of everything."

The headline on last week's report on jobs was that city's unemployment rate had fallen sharply to a four-year low. That is good news of course, but that most unreliable statistics on the city's economy is actually less important than the strong jobs performance.

The city gained 45,000 jobs in the first four months, according to the seasonally adjusted report from Eastern Consolidated, putting New York on track for an increase this year of 100,000, which is close to the record. If it happens, Mayor Michael Bloomberg will leave office with the city boasting more than 4 million workers—or 345,000 more than when he took office—despite two serious recessions.

Here are two charts that show how strong the jobs recovery has been in New York compared with the rest of the country.

Here are two charts that show how strong the jobs recovery has been in New York compared with the rest of the country.

Source: Eastern Consolidated

The knock on the jobs increase is that these are all low wage jobs. Below are the areas that have gained the most jobs since the recovery.