Anthem Adds Aspire Health to Its Care Roster

Anthem Adds Aspire Health to Its Care Roster

Anthem Inc. (NYSE: ANTM) isn’t sitting still while other managed care companies scoop up physician practices and post-acute services. The Indianapolis-based health insurer announced on May 23 that it will acquire Aspire Health, the nation’s largest non-hospice, community based palliative care provider. Financial terms were not disclosed. Aspire Health was founded in 2013 by former U.S. Senator and physician William Frist (R-TN) and Brad Smith. The latter serves as CEO of the company. Aspire currently provides services under contracts with more than 20 health plans to consumers in 25 states. The company uses proprietary predictive clinical and claims-based patient algorithms to... Read More »
Healthcare Services Roundup through April 2018

Healthcare Services Roundup through April 2018

It’s been quite a year for healthcare deals in general, with nearly 600 announced transactions in the first four months. That’s 7% more than there were announced in the first four months of 2017. Dollar volume has soared, too. In 2018, $141.8 billion has already been committed to fund the 588 transactions. Thanks to some mega-billion-dollar deals in 2018, the total is 30% greater than the nearly $109 billion spent in the same period of 2017. Collectively, the Services sectors are booming, which isn’t always the case. Services deals made up 63% of all deals in the first four months of 2018, and 57% of the disclosed dollars, now at $81.3 billion. The Technology sectors... Read More »
Humana Adds Physicians in Florida

Humana Adds Physicians in Florida

Humana (NYSE: HUM) hasn’t made a lot of waves in the Physician Medical Group sector. Its larger managed care rival, UnitedHealth Group’s Optum (NYSE: UNH), spent approximately $8.2 billion on two large physician practice acquisitions in 2017 alone. There’s also the distraction of acquisition talks with one of the world’s largest retailers, Walmart (NYSE: WMT), which were revealed by The Wall Street Journal in April 2018. While those talks are ongoing, Humana is honing its Medicare and Medicare Advantage services with the recent acquisition of Family Physicians Group based in Orlando, Florida. Financial terms were not disclosed, but it’s a safe bet they were... Read More »
Cigna Bids $67 Billion to Stay in the Race

Cigna Bids $67 Billion to Stay in the Race

Cigna (NYSE: CI) is buying Express Scripts Holdings (NYSE: ESRX) for $67 billion, including debt. Some company was going to buy it, we just weren’t sure who. The deal follows the announcement of the $77 billion CVS Health/Aetna (NYSE: CVS/AET) deal and the $4.9 billion Optum/DaVita Medical Group (NYSE: UNH/DVA) hook-up in December 2017. That’s when the word “disruption” became the top-ranked meme in U.S. healthcare. We’ll grant that CVS’s move into managed care signals a change in business-as-usual. But Optum’s deal for DaVita’s medical group didn’t break new ground. Optum has long been known as a voracious acquirer of physician... Read More »
Cigna Bids $67 Billion to Stay in the Race

Managed Care Sector Had a Big Q4:17

The fourth quarter of 2017 will be remembered for some time to come, thanks to the game-changing deal announced between pharmacy/retailer CVS Health and Aetna, one of the largest managed care companies in the country. That was only one deal, of course, and there were actually 10 transactions announced in Q4:17. Fourth quarter deal volume represents a 38% share of the 26 deals announced in the previous 12 months, and a 150% increase over the same quarter in 2016. Source: HealthCareMandA.com, January 2018 Two of the 10 deals disclosed prices in the fourth quarter, for nearly $80.6 billion, the highest ever recorded in this sector, or several others. The total represents 95% of the $84.7... Read More »

2017 Biggest Healthcare Deals by Sector

2017 was another big year for billion-dollar healthcare transactions. Among the deals that disclosed prices, 44 topped the billion-dollar mark, for a total of approximately $263.1 billion. Although that number seems high, there were 50 billion-dollar deals announced in 2015, although those totaled a slightly lower $240.1 billion. 2016 posted lower totals for both the number of billion-dollar deals (39) and combined prices ($194.1 billion). Of course the biggest healthcare deal in 2017 was the $77 billion acquisition of Aetna Inc. (NYSE: AET) by CVS Health (NYSE: CVS). But there were many more sizable transactions across the sectors, as the chart below illustrates. See how many you remember... Read More »