May Day! Hospital Mega-Mergers Ahead

May Day! Hospital Mega-Mergers Ahead

Hospital merger and acquisition activity took a breather in the first quarter of this year. The 19 deals announced then represented a 17% decrease compared with the 23 deals announced in the fourth quarter of 2016, and a 30% decrease year over year. Readers who saw headlines in April regarding a rush of hospital mergers in the first quarter, according to data published by Kaufman Hall, should know our differing results are due to methodology. We do not report hospital mergers or acquisitions when the announcement involves signing a letter of intent, when many deals fall apart soon after. Our data derives from the more solid step in the process, when both entities have reached a definitive... Read More »

Q1:17 Hospital Deals Dwindle

Mergers and acquisitions in the Hospital sector suffered in the first quarter of 2017, as President Trump took office and the Republican-led Congress vowed to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. Hospitals and health systems felt the uncertainty as deal volume slipped 17% to 19 transactions versus the previous quarter, and dropped 30% year over year. This quarter’s deal volume represents 23% of the 81 hospital transactions announced in the previous 12 months. (N.B.: We record hospital deals when they reach the definitive agreement stage, not when a letter of intent is signed.) Source: HealthCareMandA.com, April 2017 Four transactions disclosed a price, for a combined total of only... Read More »

Steward Health Buys 8 Community Health Hospitals

It’s no secret that Community Health Systems (NYSE: CYH) is selling off hospitals and medical office buildings to pay down its $15 billion debt. Its latest deal offloads eight hospitals with a total of 1,818 beds in Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania to Steward Health Care LLC for an undisclosed price. The hospitals involved in this deal are Wuesthoff Health System-Melbourne (119 beds) in Melbourne, Wuesthoff Health System-Rockledge (298 beds) in Rockledge, and Sebastian River Medical Center (154 beds) all in Florida; ValleyCare Health System of Ohio, which consists of Northside Medical Center (355 beds) in Youngstown, and Trumbull Memorial Hospital (311 beds) and Hillside Rehabilitation... Read More »

December 2016 Didn’t Deliver a Year-End Boost

The final month of the fourth quarter is typically a busy one for deal makers in all industries. Last year, some health care deal makers apparently got a rest. Deal volume in December 2016 was an anemic 119 transactions, compared with 131 deals in November and 148 in December 2015. The Services sectors accounted for 55% of the deals in December, which is on the low side. Consider that, in November, Services accounted for 69% of the month’s transactions, and even 70% of the total in December 2015. Spending on those deals reached $15.4 billion, a relatively modest amount until it is compared with November’s $8.7 billion total (+78%) and December 2015’s $12.3 billion total (+26%). Suddenly,... Read More »

Good-Bye, ACA. Now What?

And so it begins. A new year, a new administration, and a foreboding that things can and will go wildly out of control in the healthcare industry, as the new administration dismantles the Affordable Care Act and doesn’t bother to replace it. Judging from the market’s behavior since the November 8 election, the notion that a Hillary Clinton victory was “baked in” to every healthcare deal doesn’t hold. Certainly some deals may have been put on hold following Donald Trump’s election, but 2016 ended with 1,536 deals, in our preliminary count. That’s 1% higher than 2015, which was the first year to break 1,500 transactions. Spending on deals in 2016, while not in record territory, was healthy.... Read More »