Cigna’s $69 million acquisition of Express Scripts clears US Department of Justice hurdle

September 18, 2018 | by

As reported on 8 Sept, the DOJ announced on Monday that they have formally cleared the Cigna acquisition of pharmacy benefits manager Express Scripts. This puts together a major payer with a PBM manager, the latter area considered to be challenged for profitability as the PBM drug rebate model may be substantially less profitable in the future. Federal policy pressure is ramping up from Health & Human Services (HHS), with Secretary Alex Azar only last week promising disruptive change and more transparency in drug pricing.

CVS (PBM-Caremark) with Aetna is in the works and Anthem is creating its own PBM called IngenioRx. UnitedHealthcare has its own OptumRx for some years. 

Another point of pressure on the entire PBM category is the Amazon-Berkshire Hathaway-JP Morgan combine, sometime in the future when the hype and speculation on What Amazon Will Do turns into actual plans beyond their acquisition of tiny, specialized player PillPack for an exorbitant $1bn [TTA 4 July]. 

The DOJ investigation took six months, reviewed more than 2 million documents, and more than 100 industry people were interviewed.

Cigna and Express Scripts now must negotiate over 50 state departments of banking and insurance–over 50 because some states have two. Both companies already have shareholder approval, and the lack of overlap in their businesses limits the possibility of divestitures. Their advocacy website is here. But state DOBIs can be unpredictable, as Cigna found out with Anthem. (Their contentious breakup is still being contested in court–and Cigna could use the contractual breakup money to ease the Express Scripts debt estimated at $15 bn. Forbes.  Bloomberg, Healthcare Dive

Scary Monsters, Take 3: one week later, JPMorgan Chase takes heat, Amazon speculation, industry skepticism

February 7, 2018 | by

It’s the Week After the Amazon/Berkshire Hathaway/JPMorgan Chase announcement of their partnership in a non-profit joint venture to lower healthcare costs for their 1.1 million employees, and there’s a bit of a hangover. Other than a few articles, there’s been relative quiet on this front. This could be attributed to the financial markets’ roller coaster over the past few days, at least in part due to this as healthcare stocks were hardest hit. In the US, healthcare is estimated to be 18 percent of the economy based on Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) actuarial statistics for 2015…and growing. 

Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMC, had some ‘splainin’ to do with some of the bank’s healthcare clients, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal (paywalled) summarized on MarketWatch. He assured them that the JV would be to serve only the employees of the three companies. JPMC bankers handling the healthcare sector also needed some reassuring as they are “paid handsomely to help clients with mergers and other deals and worry the move could cost them business.”

Speculation on Amazon’s doings in healthcare remains feverish. A more sober look is provided by the Harvard Business Review which extrapolates how healthcare fits into Amazon’s established strength in delivery systems. Amazon could deliver routine healthcare via retail locations (Whole Foods, Amazon Go), same day prescription delivery, passive data capture developed for Amazon Go sold as a service to healthcare providers (on the model of Web Services), and data analytics.

Headlines may have trumpeted that the three-way partnership would ‘disrupt healthcare’, but our Readers in the business have heard this song before. While agreeing with their intent, this Editor differed almost immediately with the initial media cheering [TTA 31 Jan]. The Twitterverse Healthcare FlashMob in short order took it down and apart. STAT racks up some select tweets: in the ACO model, savings come when providers avoid low-value care; the contradiction of profitable companies avoiding profit; that the removal of healthy employees from existing plans will increase inequity and the actuarial burden upon the less insurable; the huge regulatory hurdle; and the dim view of investment advisory firm Piper Jaffray that it will not be a ‘meaningful disruptor’. 

In this Editor’s view, there will be considerable internal politicking, more unease from JPMC customers, and a long time before we find out what these three will be doing.

Analysis of the CVS-Aetna merger: a new era, a canary in a mine–or both?

December 6, 2017 | by
[grow_thumb image=”https://telecareaware.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/canary-in-the-coal-mine.jpgw595.jpeg” thumb_width=”150″ /]This Editor has been at two healthcare conferences in the last four business days (with tomorrow being a third). They should be abuzz about how the CVS-Aetna merger may transform healthcare delivery. To her surprise, there’s been a surprising lack of talk. There is a certain element of ‘old news’, as the initial reports date back five weeks but the sheer size of it ($240bn combined future value, $69bn purchase, an estimated $750 million in near-term synergies), being the largest health insurance deal in history, and the anticipated effects on the health delivery model normally would be a breaking news topic. To this Editor, it is a sign that no one truly knows what to make of it, and perhaps it’s too big–or threatening–to grasp for provider and payer executives especially.

For an overview of what we saw at the time as reasons why and possible competitor reaction, Readers should look back to our original article [TTA 28 Oct]. It’s being presented by both companies as a vertical merger of two complementary organizations, which already were moving towards this model, integrating their different services into “America’s front door to quality health care” (CVS CEO Larry Merlo)–a lower cost setting that saves premium dollars and brings integrated care to consumers’ doorsteps.

CVS brings to the table huge point of care assets: 9,700 pharmacy locations, 1,100 MinuteClinics, Omnicare’s senior pharmacy solutions, Coram’s infusion services, and the more than 4,000 CVS Health nursing professionals providing in-clinic and home-based care. Aetna has about 23.1 million medical members, 14.5 million dental members, and 15.2 million pharmacy benefit management (PBM) services members. Aetna also has a wealth of advanced data analytics capabilities through two subsidiaries, ActiveHealth Management and  Medicity’s health information exchange technology.

Seeking Alpha has an intriguing POV on this entry into a ‘new era’: that both CVS and Aetna consider this to be a long-term reshaping of their business model under the threat posed by Amazon, and are willing to do this despite little short-term financial benefit for either company. The problem as the writer sees it: execution. This is re-engineering care on a national scale, and its benefits are based upon combining intangibles, a murky area indeed especially in healthcare. Time is also a factor, as Amazon is getting pharmacy licenses in multiple states, and is rather an expert at combining intangibles.

Does it signal that the approach to a ‘new era’ in healthcare is accelerating? If this is a preview, 2018 will be extremely interesting. Our ‘canary in the coal mine’ may tweet–or fall over on its perch, asphyxiated.

Some additional points to consider: (more…)