Humana Borrows Big to Buy the Rest of Kindred at Home?

Strange Tony,

Humana reported the company issued $1.1 billion in debt.  The SEC filing says it is for general corporate purposes but my gut says it might be used to buy the rest of Kindred at Home from financial rapscallions TPG Capital and Welsh, Carson, Anderson and Stowe.

The recent financial implosion creates big problems for our 60% owners.  In this environment cash is king.  Washington may supply bailout money for Humana and its greedy partners, however the quickest way for our majority owners to cash up is to require Humana to buy them out.

TPG and WCAS have another reason to do the deal now.  It would be based on EBITDA prior to the coronavirus meltdown.  Humana has to pay 10.5 to 11.5 times EBITDA per the KAH buyout agreement.

The chart showed the deal as of February 2018 when Kindred CEO Ben Breier and a conflicted Board sold the company on the cheap.

Humana spent 2019 destroying our hospice by dramatically cutting staff, harming quality of care and forcing cumbersome, garbage in-garbage out technology on our site.  Other than their "investment" in crappy, unreliable technology our new owners used our hospice as a cash sluice.

It's likely $1.1 billion is not enough to buy out both rapscallions.  As of 12-31-19 Humana had over $4 billion in cash and cash equivalents.

It's ironic that Humana's borrowings could be used to save financial rapscallions.  I wonder how my former co-workers who lost jobs might feel about that.  They were sacrificed on Broussard, Causby, and Graham's altar of profits.

Anonymous.

Healthcare Workers at Risk with Coronavirus

StrangeTony,

I am worried about my hospice coworkers with the spread of the coronavirus in our country.  This disease stands to disrupt our hospice more than any corporate takeover, which is saying alot given the damage Humana and its financial rapscallion partners did to our site since July 2018.  We are down to one experienced hospice nurse and that person is looking for a new job.

An Emergency Room doctor talked about the risks to healthcare workers in the primary and acute care setting:

Nurses, doctors, and hospital and clinic staff will be regularly exposed to patients with high viral loads, increasing our personal risk immensely.

This exposure is all but inevitable, as cases are continually and rapidly slipping through screening protocols.  

Public health officials encourage people who may be ill with the virus to stay at home.  That may be a home with an elderly relative on hospice or home health.  It could be a nursing home where we have patients.

Keeping healthcare workers safe is an issue.

What is slowly starting to keep them up at night is whether the US healthcare system is prepared to properly handle an influx of cases.

Experts say there is a worrying lack of training and coordination and that the system as a whole needs to be able to communicate more effectively.

We have older hospice employees who are at greater risk for serious complications or death from the disease.  On staff we have young parents who surely do not wish to bring home the virus to their family.

“If they (healthcare workers) go down, the whole thing falls apart and destabilizes,” Hotez said. “That is the place where things could go wrong very quickly.”

I am not aware of any preparation for the coronavirus by Kindred at Home.  There has been no information shared, much less training conducted.  Things can change quickly in a community.  Preparation is important and that time is now.   So far the silence from executives and local management is deafening.

Anonymous