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One of America's biggest healthcare companies is about to become two. CVS Health confirmed on Wednesday that it will split into two publicly traded companies, unwinding years of expansion that turned a drugstore chain into one of the largest healthcare conglomerates in the United States. The separation is expected to be completed in the first half of 2028.
The announcement ends days of reports and speculation. The Financial Times first reported on Tuesday that a split was being considered, and The Wall Street Journal then reported that a decision had been made. On Wednesday, the company itself confirmed the plan, alongside third-quarter results that beat Wall Street's profit expectations.
What the two new companies will look like
The split divides CVS along the fault line of its business model. One company will keep the CVS Health name and be led by current chief executive David Joyner. It will house the insurance business Aetna and the pharmacy-benefit manager Caremark, along with primary-care clinics Oak Street Health, home-health company Signify Health, and the specialty pharmacy business.
The other company will be called CVS Pharmacy and will be led by Prem Shah, currently group president of CVS Health. It will take the roughly 9,000 retail pharmacies, the mail-order pharmacy business, and the MinuteClinic walk-in clinics. Its Pharmacy and Consumer Wellness segment alone generated $139.4 billion in revenue in 2025.
Both companies will be publicly traded, and today's shareholders will own shares in both. The two firms will remain connected by a commercial agreement, the details of which have not yet been disclosed.
Why CVS is breaking itself up
Chief executive David Joyner told The Wall Street Journal that the businesses would be better off apart. "We believe based off of where we are and how we're performing, the businesses are best served by splitting," he said. "We're basically taking what I believe is one great company and making it two."
The logic is straightforward: the two halves now face different problems. The pharmacy chain is a retail business judged on store performance, foot traffic, and front-of-store sales. The insurance and benefits businesses are judged on medical costs, drug pricing, and contracts with employers and health plans. Running both under one roof was supposed to create a seamless healthcare experience; in practice, each side's troubles dragged on the other, most visibly when Aetna's results faltered in recent years.
Pressure from outside also matters. Lawmakers and regulators have grown increasingly sceptical of vertically integrated healthcare giants that own the insurer, the middleman, and the pharmacy counter all at once. A split answers that criticism structurally rather than rhetorically, and it follows a similar logic to other corporate breakups where conglomerates have decided focus beats scale. For a sense of how fast-moving corporate stories can reshape a sector, see our coverage of AMD's data-centre surge and the record $6.3 billion Binance theft.
What it undoes — and what happens next
The breakup reverses the strategy CVS pursued for nearly two decades. It bought pharmacy-benefit manager Caremark almost 20 years ago, then paid about $78 billion for health insurer Aetna in 2018, betting that owning every link in the chain would control costs and keep patients inside its system. CVS had already explored a breakup in 2024 before deciding to press ahead; this week's confirmation makes the reversal official.
For customers, little changes immediately. Your pharmacy, your insurance card, and your prescriptions stay the same until the separation completes in 2028, and even then the two companies will keep working together under their commercial agreement. The real test comes later: whether two focused companies serve patients better than one giant did, or whether the split simply trades one set of problems for two smaller ones.
Investors will get their next clues from the separation's fine print — the debt split, the tax structure, and the terms of that commercial agreement, none of which has been disclosed yet. For now, the message from CVS is clear: the era of the all-in-one healthcare superstore is over, and the company's future comes in two parts.