UnitedHealth to buy LHC Group for $5.4 billion

UnitedHealth Group will add LHC Group, a national provider of in-home health care services, to its Optum Health business, which operates primary care clinics and surgery centers.

The health care giant will pay $170 in cash for each share of LHC’s stock in a deal expected to close later this year.

LHC Group’s 30,000 employees, including frontline care providers and administrative and support personnel, provide more than 12 million annual in-home patient-focused interventions. The LHC Group leadership team will continue forward as part of Optum Health.

“LHC Group’s sophisticated care coordination capabilities and its warm, human touch is so important for home care, 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. 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.” – Dr. Wyatt Decker, CEO, Optum Health.

“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. 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.” – Keith G. Myers, LHC Group’s chairman and CEO.