UnitedHealth Group in Eden Prairie will sell off 164 home health and hospice facilities, mostly in the South, in order to move forward with its $3.3 billion acquisition of a large home health care provider, according to a proposed settlement filed Thursday.
UnitedHealth’s proposed deal to acquire Louisiana-based Amedisys had been held up by a federal antitrust complaint that alleged competition would suffer if Minnesota’s largest company was allowed to buy the nation’s biggest provider of home health and hospice services.
However, the Department of Justice said in a statement that its anticompetitive concerns would be addressed in the settlement by reducing the number of facilities that UnitedHealth acquired in key markets.
“This settlement protects quality and price competition for hundreds of thousands of vulnerable patients and wage competition for thousands of nurses,” said Assistant Attorney General Abigail Slater of the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division.
Federal authorities and four states raised concerns about the Amedisys deal following UnitedHealth’s previous $5.4 billion acquisition of its Louisiana-based competitor, LHC Group. The antitrust complaint stated Amedisys is the nation’s largest home health and hospice provider, and LHC was third-largest at the time of its deal in 2023.
UnitedHealth Group operates the nation’s largest health insurer, UnitedHealthcare, as well as a fast-growing division for health care services called Optum. The division already owns or operates a growing network of medical offices, urgent care clinics and surgery centers across the country, but had recently joined in the race among large health systems and insurance companies to add home health providers to their networks.
Federal authorities argued that the subsequent acquisition of Amedisys would give UnitedHealth too much control over the U.S. home health market, allowing it to inflate prices by reducing competition. The settlement gives UnitedHealth a two- to three-month window to sell the 164 facilities to two smaller competitors, Kentucky-based BrightSpring Health or Idaho-based Pennant Group, or to other providers with federal approval.
The facilities excluded from UnitedHealth’s acquisition produce about $528 million in annual revenue, according to the proposed settlement, which was filed in the U.S. District Court in Maryland. The majority of facilities being sold off are in Alabama, Georgia and Tennessee — states where Amedisys and LHC have significant overlap.