CVS To Buy Signify Health For $8-B

CVS Health Corp on Monday agreed to buy home healthcare services company Signify Health for $8 billion in cash, a move that will enable one of the largest US healthcare firms to provide further care management to patients, Carolyn Humer reported for Reuters.

Photo Insert: CVS runs pharmacies, pharmacy benefits, and the Aetna insurance plans.

Healthcare companies like CVS have been expanding beyond managing health and pharmacy benefits with acquisitions of doctors groups and surgical centers in recent years.

"We’ve been very clear about what we were looking for in expanding our health services, either be it primary care, provider enablement or in the home, and Signify Health clearly checks off two boxes: into the home and provider enablement," CVS CEO Karen Lynch said in an interview.

Signify Health brings CVS, which runs pharmacies, pharmacy benefits, and the Aetna insurance plans, a network of 10,000 clinicians who provide home-based assessments of patient health and social needs.

CVS expects the deal to close in the first half of 2023 and said that it expects the acquisition to be "meaningfully" accretive to earnings.

CVS said it would pay $30.50 per share for the company, or about $7.6 billion in equity as well as about $400 million in equity appreciation rights. Lynch said the companies would work with regulators who review deals for any antitrust issues.

"We are not competitors. We don’t have any overlapping functions," Lynch said.

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