Tag Archives: UNH

Business

Judge Rejects Antitrust Challenge to UnitedHealth Acquisition

Leave a comment

U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols ruled for the companies in an opinion that he kept under seal for now because he said it “may contain competitively sensitive information.” The judge said he would release a redacted public version of the ruling in the coming days. In a one-page public order, he denied the Justice Department’s request to block the companies from completing the deal.

The court ruling represents an early blow to stepped-up antitrust enforcement by the Biden administration, which sued in February to block the deal. The Justice Department’s top antitrust official,

Jonathan Kanter,

said the department disagreed with the decision and was considering its next steps.

“Protecting competition and access to affordable healthcare is of the utmost importance to the antitrust division and the Department of Justice,” Mr. Kanter said.

The decision is a triumph for UnitedHealth, which owns the largest U.S. health insurer and a healthcare operation that comprises thousands of doctors as well as clinics, surgery centers and other assets, along with a powerful conglomeration of health data.

In a statement, a UnitedHealth spokesman said, “We are pleased with the decision and look forward to combining with Change Healthcare as quickly as possible so that together we can continue our work to make the health system work better for everyone.”

Change provides services related to payment processes for healthcare systems, analytics for financing and billing and tools that help hospitals make decisions about patient care.

UnitedHealth had agreed to divest business assets related to claims-processing to address competition concerns, an offer the Justice Department had dismissed as insufficient.

Judge Nichols in his order required UnitedHealth to make that divestiture.

UnitedHealth’s deal for Change, announced in January 2021, will bring the health-technology company under the company’s Optum health-services arm. UnitedHealth had argued that its combination with Change could help improve care by getting better information to doctors, and reduce waste. It agreed to pay nearly $8 billion for Change and assume about $5 billion in debt.

The Justice Department had argued that the deal would give UnitedHealth a virtual monopoly on an important tool that health insurers use to determine when a claim should be paid. And it said the company shouldn’t be allowed to own Change Healthcare’s data clearinghouse, which rival insurers use to compete with UnitedHealth.

The judge, an appointee of former President

Donald Trump,

signaled his skepticism of the lawsuit in a hearing earlier this month. A trial took place in August.

The lawsuit was part of an early batch of antitrust cases brought by the Justice Department under President Biden, a Democrat, that were designed to take a harder line on corporate deal activity. Among other cases, the department is waiting on a ruling in its challenge to a major publishing industry deal, Penguin Random House’s planned acquisition of Simon & Schuster. And it is preparing to go to trial next week in its lawsuit challenging a partnership between

American Airlines Group Inc.

and

JetBlue Airways Corp.

The current crop of antitrust officials, backed by calls from Democrats for a more aggressive approach, have sought to set new court precedents that would steer the law in a broader direction, after years of rulings in which the judiciary has tended to read the antitrust laws more narrowly than a generation ago. Monday’s decision served as a reminder that the Justice Department’s goals are dependent on proving their cases in front of a judge.

The Federal Trade Commission, which shares antitrust authority with the department, also is facing hurdles. It recently lost a ruling from its own in-house administrative law judge, in a case where it was challenging

Illumina Inc.’s

acquisition of cancer-testing developer Grail Inc.

Monday’s decision comes as UnitedHealth and its rivals have continued to move more deeply into vertical integration of health assets, spanning insurance and healthcare provider businesses, as well as pulling together ever-larger troves of health data.

Even after the Justice Department filed suit to block the Change deal, UnitedHealth moved ahead with other acquisitions, including a $5.4 billion takeover of home-health company

LHC Group Inc.

announced last March.

Earlier this month,

CVS Health Corp.

—the parent of health insurer Aetna, a pharmacy-benefit operation and its eponymous drugstores—announced an $8 billion deal to take over home-healthcare company Signify Health Inc. CVS has said it wants to get deeper into the business of primary care.

Write to Anna Wilde Mathews at anna.mathews@wsj.com and Brent Kendall at brent.kendall@wsj.com

Copyright ©2022 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8

Read original article here

Business

CVS Is in Advanced Talks to Buy Signify Health for Around $8 Billion

Leave a comment

CVS Health Corp.

CVS -0.49%

is in advanced talks to acquire the home-healthcare company

Signify Health Inc.

SGFY 1.34%

for around $8 billion, according to people familiar with the matter.

CVS appears to have beat out other heavy hitters including

Amazon.com Inc.

and

UnitedHealth Group Inc.,

which had been circling Signify for a deal that could be announced soon. UnitedHealth never submitted an official bid, one of the people said.

There is still no guarantee that CVS will reach a deal for Signify, which has been exploring strategic alternatives since earlier this summer.

Bids for the company were due Sept. 6, but people familiar with the matter have said that an eager buyer could make a move before then.

Signify’s valuation has ballooned since The Wall Street Journal reported in August that it was for sale. Shares of the company closed at $28.77 on Friday, giving it a market capitalization of roughly $6.7 billion.

Signify works with a large group of doctors to facilitate house calls. It uses analytics and technology to help physician groups, health plans, employers and health systems with in-home care. It offers health evaluations for Medicare Advantage and other plans.

At the close of its deal this year to buy Caravan Health, Signify said that it supported roughly $10 billion in total medical spending.

The company went public in February 2021, raising more than $500 million as a result of the offering. On the day of its initial public offering, shares of the company priced above its expected range, at $24.

New York-based New Mountain Capital has backed Signify since 2017. The firm—which had more than $37 billion in assets under management as of early August—has steadily expanded Signify through a series of mergers and acquisitions since its initial investment.

New Mountain is well-versed in the healthcare sector. It previously sold the healthcare payments firm Equian LLC to UnitedHealth for roughly $3.2 billion in 2019.

For CVS, the deal builds on an effort years in the making to transform itself into a major provider of healthcare services through acquisitions and expanded medical services. The company had been struggling to counter slowing revenue from prescription drugs, which drive the bulk of its sales, and to ward off competition from

Amazon

AMZN -0.24%

for retail dollars.

CVS, the nation’s largest drugstore chain by stores and revenue, acquired Aetna in 2018, arguing that melding the insurance company’s patient data with its network of nearly 10,000 bricks-and-mortar sites would squeeze out costs while improving care and convenience.

The strategy has paid off, buoyed by a surge in demand for Covid-19 vaccines and tests at the height of the pandemic. CVS’s market capitalization has grown to more than $130 billion from around $75 billion since the Aetna deal.

The line between Amazon and Walmart is becoming increasingly blurred, as the two companies seek to maintain their slice of the estimated $5 trillion retail market while chipping away at each other’s share, often by borrowing ideas. Photos: Amazon/Walmart

The company is outperforming

Walgreens Boots Alliance Inc.,

which opted against major acquisitions, in the years since. Walgreens, also racing to expand into healthcare, focused largely on partnerships rather than deals. But last year it bought a controlling stake in the primary-care network Village MD, giving it doctors’ offices that CVS had said it could do without.

CVS Chief Executive

Karen Lynch

has since said that the company must have a foothold in primary care if it is to become a full-service medical provider.

CVS had previously been interested in a deal for the parent of One Medical, people familiar with the matter have said.

Amazon

AMZN -0.24%

agreed to purchase the primary-care clinic operator for about $3.9 billion in July.

The Federal Trade Commission is currently investigating the deal. The parent company of One Medical,

1Life Healthcare Inc.,

disclosed the investigation in a securities filing. The disclosure said One Medical and Amazon each received a request for additional information about the deal from the FTC.

While Wall Street has largely focused on CVS’s efforts to acquire primary-care practices, executives have also discussed ambitions to expand its in-home health presence.

A deal for Signify would represent a bright spot in an otherwise lackluster run for deals lately. Deal volumes globally are down roughly 30% this year after a flurry of activity last year, because of a drop in companies’ valuations, market volatility and other factors including Russia’s war in Ukraine.

Healthcare deal making in particular has slowed more than many other sectors. Over $200 billion of healthcare deals announced so far this year has compared with over $400 billion at this time last year, according to Dealogic. The largest healthcare deal to date this year in the U.S. is

Pfizer Inc.’s

$11.6 billion agreement in May to purchase the rest of

Biohaven Pharmaceutical Holding Co.

Write to Laura Cooper at laura.cooper@wsj.com, Sharon Terlep at sharon.terlep@wsj.com and Cara Lombardo at cara.lombardo@wsj.com

Copyright ©2022 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8

Read original article here

Business

Get ready for the climb. Here’s what history says about stock-market returns during Fed rate-hike cycles.

Leave a comment

Bond yields are rising again so far in 2022. The U.S. stock market seems vulnerable to a bona fide correction. But what can you really tell from a mere two weeks into a new year? Not much and quite a lot.

One thing feels assured: the days of making easy money are over in the pandemic era. Benchmark interest rates are headed higher and bond yields, which have been anchored at historically low levels, are destined to rise in tandem.

Read: Weekend reads: How to invest amid higher inflation and as interest rates rise

It seemed as if Federal Reserve members couldn’t make that point any clearer this past week, ahead of the traditional media blackout that precedes the central bank’s first policy meeting of the year on Jan. 25-26.

The U.S. consumer-price and producer-price index releases this week have only cemented the market’s expectations of a more aggressive or hawkish monetary policy from the Fed.

The only real question is how many interest-rate increases will the Federal Open Market Committee dole out in 2022. JPMorgan Chase & Co.
JPM,
-6.15%
CEO Jamie Dimon intimated that seven might be the number to beat, with market-based projections pointing to the potential for three increases to the federal funds rate in the coming months.

Check out: Here’s how the Federal Reserve may shrink its $8.77 trillion balance sheet to combat high inflation

Meanwhile, yields for the 10-year Treasury note yielded 1.771% Friday afternoon, which means that yields have climbed by about 26 basis points in the first 10 trading days to start a calendar year, which would be the briskest such rise since 1992, according to Dow Jones Market Data. Back 30 years ago, the 10-year rose 32 basis points to around 7% to start that year.

The 2-year note
TMUBMUSD02Y,
0.960%,
which tends to be more sensitive to the Fed’s interest rate moves, is knocking on the door of 1%, up 24 basis points so far this year, FactSet data show.

But do interest rate increases translate into a weaker stock market?

As it turns out, during so-called rate-hike cycles, which we seem set to enter into as early as March, the market tends to perform strongly, not poorly.

In fact, during a Fed rate-hike cycle the average return for the Dow Jones Industrial Average
DJIA,
-0.56%
is nearly 55%, that of the S&P 500
SPX,
+0.08%
is a gain of 62.9% and the Nasdaq Composite
COMP,
+0.59%
has averaged a positive return of 102.7%, according to Dow Jones, using data going back to 1989 (see attached table). Fed interest rate cuts, perhaps unsurprisingly, also yield strong gains, with the Dow up 23%, the S&P 500 gaining 21% and the Nasdaq rising 32%, on average during a Fed rate hike cycle.

Dow Jones Market Data

Interest rate cuts tend to occur during periods when the economy is weak and rate hikes when the economy is viewed as too hot by some measure, which may account for the disparity in stock market performance during periods when interest-rate reductions occur.

To be sure, it is harder to see the market producing outperformance during a period in which the economy experiences 1970s-style inflation. Right now, it feels unlikely that bullish investors will get a whiff of double-digit returns based on the way stocks are shaping up so far in 2022. The Dow is down 1.2%, the S&P 500 is off 2.2%, while the Nasdaq Composite is down a whopping 4.8% thus far in January.

Read: Worried about a bubble? Why you should overweight U.S. equities this year, according to Goldman

What’s working?

So far this year, winning stock market trades have been in energy, with the S&P 500’s energy sector
SP500.10,
+2.44%

XLE,
+2.35%
looking at a 16.4% advance so far in 2022, while financials
SP500.40,
-1.01%

XLF,
-1.04%
are running a distant second, up 4.4%. The other nine sectors of the S&P 500 are either flat or lower.

Meanwhile, value themes are making a more pronounced comeback, eking out a 0.1% weekly gain last week, as measured by the iShares S&P 500 Value ETF
IVE,
-0.14%,
but month to date the return is 1.2%.

See: These 3 ETFs let you play the hot semiconductor sector, where Nvidia, Micron, AMD and others are growing sales rapidly

What’s not working?

Growth factors are getting hammered thus far as bond yields rise because a rapid rise in yields makes their future cash flows less valuable. Higher interest rates also hinder technology companies’ ability to fund stock buy backs. The popular iShares S&P 500 Growth ETF
IVW,
+0.28%
is down 0.6% on the week and down 5.1% in January so far.

What’s really not working?

Biotech stocks are getting shellacked, with the iShares Biotechnology ETF
IBB,
+0.65%
down 1.1% on the week and 9% on the month so far.

And a popular retail-oriented ETF, the SPDR S&P Retail ETF
XRT,
-2.10%
tumbled 4.1% last week, contributing to a 7.4% decline in the month to date.

And Cathie Wood’s flagship ARK Innovation ETF
ARKK,
+0.33%
finished the week down nearly 5% for a 15.2% decline in the first two weeks of January. Other funds in the complex, including ARK Genomic Revolution ETF
ARKG,
+1.04%
and ARK Fintech Innovation ETF
ARKF,
-0.99%
are similarly woebegone.

And popular meme names also are getting hammered, with GameStop Corp.
GME,
-4.76%
down 17% last week and off over 21% in January, while AMC Entertainment Holdings
AMC,
-0.44%
sank nearly 11% on the week and more than 24% in the month to date.

Gray swan?

MarketWatch’s Bill Watts writes that fears of a Russian invasion of Ukraine are on the rise, and prompting analysts and traders to weigh the potential financial-market shock waves. Here’s what his reporting says about geopolitical risk factors and their longer-term impact on markets.

Week ahead

U.S. markets are closed in observance of the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday on Monday.

Read: Is the stock market open on Monday? Here are the trading hours on Martin Luther King Jr. Day

Notable U.S. corporate earnings

(Dow components in bold)
TUESDAY:

Goldman Sachs Group
GS,
-2.52%,
Truist Financial Corp.
TFC,
+0.96%,
Signature Bank
SBNY,
+0.07%,
PNC Financial
PNC,
-1.33%,
J.B. Hunt Transport Services
JBHT,
-1.04%,
Interactive Brokers Group Inc.
IBKR,
-1.22%

WEDNESDAY:

Morgan Stanley
MS,
-3.58%,
Bank of America
BAC,
-1.74%,
U.S. Bancorp.
USB,
+0.09%,
State Street Corp.
STT,
+0.32%,
UnitedHealth Group Inc.
UNH,
+0.27%,
Procter & Gamble
PG,
+0.96%,
Kinder Morgan
KMI,
+1.82%,
Fastenal Co.
FAST,
-2.55%

THURSDAY:

Netflix
NFLX,
+1.25%,
United Airlines Holdings
UAL,
-2.97%,
American Airlines
AAL,
-4.40%,
Baker Hughes
BKR,
+4.53%,
Discover Financial Services
DFS,
-1.44%,
CSX Corp.
CSX,
-0.82%,
Union Pacific Corp.
UNP,
-0.55%,
The Travelers Cos. Inc. TRV, Intuitive Surgical Inc. ISRG, KeyCorp.
KEY,
+1.16%

FRIDAY:

Schlumberger
SLB,
+4.53%,
Huntington Bancshares Inc.
HBAN,
+1.73%

U.S. economic reports

Tuesday

  • Empire State manufacturing index for January due at 8:30 a.m. ET
  • NAHB home builders index for January at 10 a.m.

Wednesday

  • Building permits and starts for December at 8:30 a.m.
  • Philly Fed Index for January at 8:30 a.m.

Thursday

  • Initial jobless claims for the week ended Jan. 15 (and continuing claims for Jan. 8) at 8:30 a.m.
  • Existing home sales for December at 10 a.m.

Friday

Leading economic indicators for December at 10 a.m.

Read original article here

Business

UNH Stock: UnitedHealth Earnings Top, Dow Jones Giant Nears Buy Point

Leave a comment

UnitedHealth Group (UNH) beat second-quarter views and raised guidance as the spreading Delta variant of the coronavirus poses new risks as hospitalizations rise. UNH stock rose slightly, nearing a buy point.




X



UnitedHealth Earnings

Estimates: Wall Street expects UnitedHealth earnings to decline 38% to $4.43 per share, reflecting tough comparisons in part. Revenue is seen climbing 12% to $69.47 billion, according to FactSet. The company saw a profit windfall in Q2 2020, when earnings nearly doubled as the coronavirus lockdowns led Americans to forgo nonemergency medical care.

Analyst forecast that UnitedHealth’s medical cost ratio, a key metric, is expected to reach 83%. The ratio, also known as medical loss ratio, measures the percentage of premiums that health insurers pay out in medical claims. It’s closely watched as the engine of the managed care industry.

In Q1, United Health’s medical care ratio reached 80.9%, up from 79.1% the prior quarter.

Results: UnitedHealth earnings of $4.70 a share while revenue grew 15% to $71.32 billion. The medical cost ratio was 82.8% vs. 70.2% a year earlier, as Americans avoided seeing the doctor or using their medical benefits during the pandemic.

Outlook: After beating Q2 views by 27 cents, UnitedHealth now sees 2021 EPS of $18.30-$18.60 vs. its April guidance of $18.10-$18.60. Wall Street had forecast UnitedHealth earnings per share of $18.57, FactSet says.

IBD Live: A New Tool For Daily Stock Market Analysis

UNH Stock

Shares of the Dow Jones health giant rose 1.3% to 420.05 in Thursday stock market trading. UNH stock is in a flat base with a 426.10 buy point, according to MarketSmith chart analysis.

The relative strength line for UnitedHealth stock is lackluster and below the consolidation peak. A rising RS line shows a stock is outperforming the S&P 500 index.

The coronavirus pandemic initially lifted UnitedHealth earnings as Americans deferred elective procedures. Now the wind could blow the other way given higher Covid-19 treatment and testing costs, while more people are seeing their doctors again.

The Delta variant is especially of concern. Hospitalizations are rising again, though well below January’s peak, as the more contagious coronavirus strain spreads among the unvaccinated.

Meanwhile, UnitedHealth’s planned purchase of Change Healthcare (CHNG) is under antitrust scrutiny.

Find Aparna Narayanan on Twitter at @IBD_Aparna.

YOU MAY ALSO LIKE:

These Are The 5 Best Stocks To Buy And Watch Now

Stocks To Watch: Top-Rated IPOs, Big Caps And Growth Stocks

Why This IBD Tool Simplifies The Search For Top Stocks

Looking For The Next Big Stock Market Winners? Start With These 3 Steps

Dow Jones Industrial Average Stock News



Read original article here