Cold water has been tossed on the idea that CVS Health would break up the company and sell off health or pharmacy benefits from assets that provide medical care. In his first earnings call following a quarterly earnings report, CEO David Joyner gave no indication any company breakup was in the cards. In fact, Joyner committed to forging ahead to improve the diversified portfolio of businesses CVS has that include drugstores and an array of outpatient services and primary care clinics; the Caremark pharmacy benefit management company and Aetna.
The for-profit General Catalyst’s Health Assurance Transformation LLC will pay $485 million to acquire Akron’s Summa Health, the two organizations said Thursday in releasing new details for the deal originally announced earlier this year.
Tenet Healthcare Corp.'s CEO and others must be deposed in a lawsuit alleging that the company fired two employees in retaliation for making complaints about alleged unsanitary hospital conditions, a federal district court said. This decision is another in a string of recent rulings rejecting the so-called Apex Doctrine, a principle that top corporate officers are generally too busy and important to be forced to give testimony. Denise Bonds and Shenia Rhodes, who worked as housekeepers at a Detroit hospital, allege that the defendants engaged in cost-cutting measures that made the hospital unsafe during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Mercy Fitzgerald Hospital shuttered its inpatient behavioral health unit on Oct. 26. 'While there is a need for these services in our community, operational and financial challenges make it difficult for us to continue doing so,' Mercy Fitzgerald spokesperson Jason Griffith said. The cuts to those services at the 178-bed hospital in Darby is a devastating blow to health care in Delco and Southwest Philadelphia. Mercy Fitzgerald serves more than 186,000 patients each year.
Inside the more than 600 Roman Catholic hospitals across the country, not a single nun can be found occupying a chief executive suite. Nuns founded and led those hospitals in a mission to treat sick and poor people, but some were also shrewd business leaders. Sister Irene Kraus, a former chief executive of Daughters of Charity National Health System, was famous for coining the phrase "no margin, no mission." It means hospitals must succeed — generating enough revenue to exceed expenses — to fulfill their original mission. Over time, that focus on margins led the hospitals to transform into behemoths that operate for-profit subsidiaries and pay their executives millions.
CVS says a former top UnitedHealth Group executive, Steve Nelson will lead Aetna effective today. The health conglomerate is betting on an insurance-industry veteran from a company that investors have long favored to run the insurer, which has been at the heart of CVS's recent financial woes. Nelson was previously CEO of UnitedHealth's insurance arm, the industry's largest and the one with the biggest Medicare business.