Humana announced on Tuesday that BlackRock is buying out Welsh, Carson, Anderson and Stowe’s majority stake in CenterWell Senior Primary Care, its network of about 150 clinics focused on Medicare Advantage patients, in a transaction valued at $2.8 billion. The buyer vehicle is HPS Investment Partners, the private credit and alternatives manager BlackRock owns.
Welsh Carson first invested in the venture in 2020 and has put at least $1.8 billion into it since then, according to Humana policy disclosures cited by STAT. A six-year hold ending in a sale to another financial sponsor, rather than to a strategic buyer or public market, fits the pattern of healthcare services assets circulating among large alternative managers as the first generation of value-based care platforms matures.
Humana keeps its interest in the business and framed the change of sponsor as funding, not exit. The insurer said the transaction would, over the next two years, help fund existing clinic operations, open new clinics and support other strategic acquisitions inside CenterWell.
The deal is also a marker for where senior primary care sits in the capital stack. Clinics built around capitated Medicare Advantage contracts were a flagship private equity theme earlier in the decade; a $2.8 billion sponsor-to-sponsor transfer at this scale says the model still commands institutional prices, now from the credit-adjacent end of the market rather than growth equity.