Tag: Humana

Recon takes an analytical look behind select developments in healthcare

Big box retail as health insurance channel: thoughts on the Aetna-Costco deal

Tory Wolff April 27, 2012

Summary Aetna has struck a deal to sell individual health insurance with Costco, the #6 retailer. The deal targets 9 populous states first with more to follow in 2012 While the deal lacks some of the levers of the very successful Walmart-Humana Part D deal, there is real potential for this channel to attract consumers if employers opt-out on a large scale Given that Aetna has some arrangements with Best Buy (the #9 retailer) and an established alliance with CVS (the #7 retailer), it looks like Aetna is building out

Bubble in acquisition pricing of Medicare Advantage lives?

Tory Wolff December 7, 2011

Several recent acquisitions suggest a rapidly growing valuation on Medicare Advantage (MA) lives. Last August, Healthspring paid about $3.6K per adjusted MA life with its acquisition of Bravo. (My adjustments extract the value of the PDP lives using the CVS acquisition of Universal American PDP lives as a benchmark and for the share of Special Needs Plan or SNP lives which typically have higher utilization levels and higher reimbursement). This past November, there were two major MA acquisitions, both with sharply higher prices. Cigna (CI) bought Healthspring for $3.8B —

XL Health in play: what do the three suitors see?

Tory Wolff November 18, 2011

UPDATE: United buys XL Health! Here’s what we surmised in the original post on this topic: “That leaves United. A leadership position in C-SNPs would fit well with United’s leading position in Medicare Advantage overall, #1 position in D-SNPs and #2 position in I-SNPs. The capabilities would also seem to be readily applicable to the broader Medicare population (given, for example, the potential transfers back and forth across between C-SNP and regular Medicare Advantage). The curious thing is that United dramatically reduced its C-SNP business last year (went from about

Major health plan Q1 earnings: Profit surprise in commercial risk; multiple reasons why business prospects look good

Tory Wolff May 21, 2011

Public health insurers startled the market with earnings ~25% above consensus expectations. A key driver was lower-than-expected utilization (particularly in the under 65 commercial lives) which kept medical costs down. Management teams offered two theories in the analyst calls: bad weather and the beginning-of-the-year reset of consumer directed (CD) deductibles; neither is compelling: A lot of discretionary care has already been squeezed out of the system by the bad economy; it is hard to imagine that bad weather would drive out a lot more. Also the utilization decline was concentrated

Tag: Humana

Recon takes an analytical look behind select developments in healthcare

Big box retail as health insurance channel: thoughts on the Aetna-Costco deal

Bubble in acquisition pricing of Medicare Advantage lives?

XL Health in play: what do the three suitors see?

Major health plan Q1 earnings: Profit surprise in commercial risk; multiple reasons why business prospects look good

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