They say that money talks, but apparently AmSurg's $7.8 billion offer to buy Knoxville-based Team Health Holdings Inc. didn't talk loudly enough. TeamHealth (NYSE: TMH) has rejected the unsolicited cash-and-stock offer from Nashville-based AmSurg (Nasdaq: AMSG), which represented a 36 percent premium over Team Health's closing price of $52.50 Monday. AmSurg publicly disclosed its offer Tuesday morning. "[T]his is the same proposal that [our] board of directors previously reviewed, considered and rejected as not in the best interest of TeamHealth and its stockholders," the company said in a statement.
This might seem to be a rough political patch for the pharmaceutical and medical device industries. The exponential price increases of several drugs have brought scrutiny to the overall rise in drug costs and have prompted several 2016 candidates, most notably Hillary Clinton, to vow action to rein in the industry. Meanwhile, thousands of complaints are pouring into the Food and Drug Administration about a contraceptive implant made by Bayer. In Congress, however, things are looking better for the manufacturers. Legislation is advancing that would speed up the FDA's approval process for medications and medical devices, offering a rare example of how major initiatives can get traction even in today's gridlocked Washington.
Just across from the FDR Drive, one of the first visible hurricane protections built since Sandy is going up: The Veterans Administration is building an 11-foot-high flood wall around the perimeter of its giant Manhattan hospital. Meanwhile, the city's flagship public hospital, Bellevue, is just a block to the north. Construction on a similar flood wall there is not expected until the middle of next year at the earliest. Both facilities were severely damaged in Sandy. But the rebuilding processes at the two facilities were funded through different paths. The city's took a lot longer, prompting a city lawyer to go so far as to consider mocking up letterhead of a federal agency, and leading the mayor to announce a deal five months before the details were finalized.
It turns out that those boring, confusing insurance claims are a great crowd-sourcing resource for health information. En masse, they can tell you how frequently an obstetrician-gynecologist does a Cesarean section or whether an orthopedic surgeon is really experienced at performing hip replacements. Amino, a new consumer-targeted health care app, mines insurance claims from 188 million people to tally such trends. That's big data: 3.9 billion claims filed by every practicing physician in the country—all 900,000 of them—since 2012. After de-identifying personal details, Amino spits out information that can help people choose a doctor with more precision.
Louisville health care giant Humana took one step closer to changing hands on Monday. Aetna and Humana shareholders resoundingly ratified the proposed $37 billion acquisition of Humana, the Louisville-based health care company, by Aetna. The acquisition was put to separate votes of both companies' shareholders at special meetings Monday afternoon. Humana executives reported that of the 129,240,721 shares voting at the offices of its New York City law firm, more than 99 percent voted in favor of the adoption of the merger agreement. A relatively tiny minority, holders of 489,852 opposed the sale agreement and more than 512,000 abstained, Humana investor relations team reported to the Securities and Exchange Commission late Monday afternoon.
The cost of visiting the doctor is climbing as hospitals scoop up a growing number of physicians' groups, according to a Harvard Medical School study. Researchers found that when small doctors' practices join large hospitals, their patients pay an average of $75 more every year for outpatient services like check-ups, even though the number of appointments stays the same. With data from cities across the United States, the study is the first to document the cost of physician acquisitions by hospitals on a national scale.