Cigna on Thursday closed its $54 billion deal to buy Express Scripts, creating one of the biggest providers of pharmacy benefits and insurance plans in the US, a combination it says will help it improve health care coordination and cut costs.
Cigna’s deal puts it in direct competition with two other health care companies set up the same way — Aetna with CVS Health and UnitedHealth with Optum. Cigna’s deal has already passed antitrust scrutiny.
Cigna will start offering new products next year to its corporate health insurance customers, including access to Express Scripts’ specialty pharmacy, which has cost savings programs in treatment areas such as cancer, its top executive said in an interview on Thursday.
Prescription drugs that require special handling and are delivered to a doctor’s office or patient’s home by specialty pharmacies are a growing part of employer health care spending and rising US drug costs. Many new drugs costs tens of thousands of dollars when they are launched and drugmakers raise the price of older drugs once or twice a year.
The company will also try to improve products and services by integrating health care data, he said.
“There’s a lot of data available today but it’s either not aggregated in a singular place or coalesced in a way that’s intuitive,” Cigna chief executive officer David Cordani said in an interview.