UnitedHealth Group Enters Home Health With $5.4B Acquisition of LHC Group

EDEN PRAIRIE, Minn. and LAFAYETTE, La. (March 29, 2022)—UnitedHealth Group has announced plans to acquire LHC Group, a national patient-focused provider of high-quality in-home health care services for about $5.4 billion cash value. The acquisition plan calls for LHC Group to combine with Optum Health, an information and technology-enabled health services business. The agreement calls for the acquisition of LHC Group’s outstanding common stock for $170 per share. 

The combination of LHC Group with Optum Health, which works with over 100 health plans, unites two organizations dedicated to providing compassionate and comprehensive care to patients and their families. LHC Group’s history of high-quality home and community-based care matched with Optum’s extensive value-based care experience and resources will accelerate the combined companies’ ability to deliver integrated care, improving outcomes and patient experiences.

“LHC Group’s sophisticated care coordination capabilities and its warm, human touch is so important for homecare, and will greatly enhance the reach of Optum’s value-based capabilities along the full continuum of care, including primary care, home and community care, virtual care, behavioral health and ambulatory surgery,” said Dr. Wyatt Decker, CEO, Optum Health in a press release. “We greatly admire how the people of LHC Group have created a culture that enables them to be a trusted health care partner to patients and their families when they need it the most, and we look forward to working with and learning from them.”

“Since our founding in 1994, ‘it’s all about helping people’ has been the core of our mission, and as part of the Optum team and its value-based capabilities, we will be able to expand our patient-centered mission and help drive best care practices across the country,” said Keith G. Myers, LHC Group’s chairman and CEO. “Working together as organizations committed to caring for the most vulnerable in society will help us more effectively and efficiently deliver high quality and increasingly value-based care in the home.”

This announcement comes a month after the U.S. Justice Department sued to stop UnitedHealth’s $8 billion acquisition of billing and payment services provider Change Healthcare, saying the deal would give the health insurer access to its competitors’ data. Last year, Humana acquired Kindred at Home for $5.7 billion. 

LHC Group has 30,000 employees across 964 locations in 37 states. LHC Group’s employees, including frontline care providers and administrative and support personnel, provide more than 12 million annual in-home patient-focused interventions and is widely recognized as one of the highest-quality providers of in-home care, with quality scores consistently running more than one-third higher than industry norms. The LHC Group leadership team will continue forward as part of Optum Health.

The agreement calls for the acquisition of LHC Group’s common stock for $170 per share in cash and is expected to close in the second half of 2022 subject to LHC Group shareholder approvals, regulatory approvals and other customary closing conditions. LHC Group co-founders Keith and Ginger Myers will personally invest $10 million in UnitedHealth Group stock following the close of the combination. The acquisition is expected to be neutral to UnitedHealth Group’s outlook for adjusted net earnings per share in 2022, modestly accretive in 2023, and advancing strongly in subsequent years.

Visit optum.com, lhcgroup.com and unitedhealthgroup.com for more information.