CVS-Aetna Merger Wins Approval Only to Face Debt Cliff
The megamerger makes sense, but the size, timing and amount of debt involved makes the deal look increasingly risky.
It’s slightly more complicated than that.
Photographer: Christopher Dilts/BloombergWell, this seems to make it official: The Trump administration only cares about vertical mergers in media. Or at the very least, it has no problem when it comes to these types of deals and health care.
CVS Health Corp.’s $69 billion purchase of insurer Aetna Inc. — the fifth-largest health-care deal ever — got conditional approval from the Department of Justice on Wednesday. The DOJ only requires the already in-progress divestiture of Aetna’s Medicare drug plans in order to approve the deal. The decision comes less than a month after the approval of Cigna Corp.’s purchase of Express Scripts Holding Co., another so-called vertical deal that will join together an insurer and pharmacy benefit manager — not direct competitors, but both players in the health-care process.