Health

The Chicago Community Development Commission on Tuesday approved providing $4.6 million in Tax Increment Financing money to Swedish Covenant Hospital on the city's Northwest Side for the construction of a women’s health center and renovations of emergency facilities.

At last month’s CDC meeting, commissioners green lighted the creation of the Foster/California TIF district, a special property taxing area concocted solely to generate funds to cover improvements of the 128 year-old nonprofit hospital.

The Cook County Health and Hospitals System has initiated CountyCare applications for about 141,000 county residents who are eligible for the program that began in January 2013 for those newly eligible for Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act.

Linda Diamond Shapiro, chief strategy officer for CCHHS, revealed at a finance committee board meeting Friday, “We’ve touched about a third of the people eligible,” adding that, “It gets harder and harder” to find eligible applicants because “we get the easy-to-reach first.”