Aetna shares surge after reports of $66B offer from CVS

Shares in Aetna Inc. rose Thursday after the Wall Street Journal reported that CVS Health Corp. is in talks to buy the insurer, offering more than $200 a share in deal valued at about $66 billion.

Aetna stock jumped 12 percent, to $178.60 per share, closing at a record high, while CVS fell 2.9 percent, to $73.31. Spokesmen for Aetna and CVS declined to comment.

A deal would create a health-services giant and a bigger competitor for UnitedHealth Group Inc., which is the largest U.S. health insurer and has its own own clinics and a pharmacy-benefits unit.

CVS runs drugstores and clinics, helps insurers manage their pharmacy benefits, and already sells a pharmacy-insurance plan for older people, known as Medicare Part D. The company has a market value of about $75 billion, while Aetna was valued at about $53 billion before surging on the Journal’s report.

Aetna CEO Mark Bertolini has talked in the past about deepening the insurer’s relationship with CVS, and relying on the company to deliver some types of care to the insurer’s customers or provide them with medical equipment.

CVS has been an aggressive deal maker in its history, though buying Aetna would easily be the biggest deal CVS has ever done. In 2007, it bought drug benefit manager Caremark Rx Inc. in a deal valued at the time at $27.2 billion, to become a powerhouse in the benefit management business. And in 2015, it acquired the nursing home pharmacy operator Omnicare Inc. for $12.9 billion.

Any transaction would signal a return to deal-making in the health-services industry, after two blockbuster health-insurance mergers were scuttled by opposition from antitrust regulators.

Aetna had made a deal for rival Humana Inc., while Indianapolis-based Anthem Inc. sought to acquire Cigna Corp. The two mega-mergers would have reduced the ranks of big U.S. health insurers from five to three, a prospect that led the Justice Department to oppose both.