Health insurer Cigna Corp. announced Tuesday that it will unilaterally terminate its $54 billion merger agreement with Anthem Inc. after the deal was rejected by a federal judge. The news came after insurance giants Aetna Inc. and Humana Inc. announced a mutual decision to abandon their $37 billion merger agreement earlier in the day.
An Anthem spokesman said the company is still committed to closing its deal with Cigna, signaling the breakup could be messy. In a news release, Cigna announced it had filed a lawsuit in Delaware Chancery Court against Anthem seeking a judgment that the merger agreement had been terminated lawfully and seeking a $1.85 billion termination fee, along with an additional $13 billion in damages.
"These additional damages include the amount of premium that Cigna shareholders did not realize as a result of the failed merger process," the company said in its release. "The company believes strongly in the merits of its case and hopes that this matter is rapidly resolved."
Anthem spokesman Jill Becher said Cigna's action was invalid and said the company "does not have a right to terminate the agreement."
"Anthem will continue to enforce its rights under the merger agreement," Becher wrote.
The dissolution of the Aetna-Humana proposal is proceeding more smoothly. Last month, a federal judge upheld the Justice Department's decision to block that deal. Aetna will pay Humana a $1 billion breakup fee, the companies said, which will amount to about $630 million after taxes.
"While we continue to believe that a combined company would create greater value for health care consumers through improved affordability and quality, the current environment makes it too challenging to continue pursuing the transaction," Aetna chief executive Mark Bertolini said in a statement. "We are disappointed to take this course of action after 19 months of planning, but both companies need to move forward with their respective strategies in order to continue to meet member expectations."
Thomas Noland, a spokesman for Humana, said in an email that the company had always known that the deal might not go through.
"We have therefore planned carefully for it, and are fully prepared to continue to go forward as an independent company," Noland said.
The two mergers were first proposed in 2015 and would have reshaped the health insurance landscape in the United States by consolidating the four of the largest insurers into two companies. Both deals were blocked by the Justice Department on antitrust grounds, and two different federal judges upheld those decisions in the past few weeks.
U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson said the Anthem-Cigna deal would raise prices and eliminate competition between the two insurers for large national accounts -- employers buying health plans for more than 5,000 employees.
U.S. District Judge John Bates said the Aetna-Humana deal would have been anti-competitive and raised prices for consumers, specifically in the business of selling private Medicare plans in hundreds of counties and in the health insurance exchanges set up by the Affordable Care Act in three counties in Florida.
The formal conclusion of the Aetna-Humana deal did not come as a surprise; analysts had expected that Aetna and Humana would not appeal the decision.
Scott Fidel, an analyst at Credit Suisse, wrote in a research note that after a trip to Aetna last week, "we came away from the meeting viewing the likelihood of an appeal of Judge Bates' adverse ruling as extremely low, as management conceded that an appeal would likely face a very high hurdle to success." Ana Gupte, an analyst with Leerink Partners wrote that the deal was viewed "as completely dead at this point" in a note last week.
Analysts have speculated that Humana, which is strong in the Medicare Advantage business of selling private Medicare plans, could now be targeted in a future deal by either Anthem or Cigna.
Business on 02/15/2017