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Companies and Brands

CVS to Buy Aetna for $68 Billion

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Published
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CVS to Buy Aetna for $68 Billion

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According to reports in several media, CVS Healthcare Corp. (NYSE: CVS) will buy Aetna Inc. (NYSE: AET). The deal has been rumored for weeks

Bloomberg editors wrote:

 CVS Health Corp. will buy Aetna Inc. for about $67.5 billion, according to a person familiar with the matter, creating a health-care and retail giant that will have a hand in everything from insurance to the corner drugstore.

CVS will pay $207 a share for Aetna, made up of $145 a share in cash and the rest in stock, according to the person, who spoke on condition of anonymity. That’s a 29 percent premium to Aetna’s share price on Oct. 25, the day before the companies were said to be in talks.

The deal, among the biggest health-care mergers of the last decade, is expected to be officially announced later Sunday, according to the person. Including CVS’s assumption of Aetna’s debt, the deal will total $78 billion.

The deal combines the largest U.S. drugstore chain with the third-biggest health insurer, rolling Aetna’s health insurance business with CVS’s drug plans and retail operations. In doing so, it may herd some of Aetna’s 22 million customers into CVS drugstores when they fill a prescription through CVS’s drug plans. It will also give Aetna’s insurance plans a closer on-the-ground tie to where customers get care.

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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