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CVS will split in two, undoing its Aetna empire

Beau Brummell · November 4, 2026
The drugstores and the insurer will become separate listed companies by 2028. The shares fell 12 per cent.

CVS Health is going to undo the deal that defined it. On Wednesday the company said it will split into two listed companies by the first half of 2028, separating its roughly 9,000 drugstores from the Aetna insurer and the Caremark pharmacy benefit manager.

The shares fell more than 12 per cent on the day, according to CNBC, which had valued the group at about $117bn before the announcement.

Who gets what

The insurance side keeps the CVS Health name. It will hold Aetna, CVS Caremark, the specialty pharmacy, Oak Street Health and Signify Health, and stay under chairman and chief executive David Joyner. The retail side will be called CVS Pharmacy. It gets the stores, the mail-order pharmacy, MinuteClinic and a consumer technology unit called Health100, and will be run by Prem Shah, now group president.

Shareholders will own stock in both. CVS says the split is meant to be tax-free and that each company should keep a solid investment-grade rating and pay a dividend. It still needs final board approval and an effective Form 10 filing with the SEC.

Unwinding a 20-year build

Reuters reported that the break-up returns CVS to being a standalone pharmacy chain for the first time since it bought Caremark in 2006. The biggest piece of the empire, Aetna, cost $78bn in 2018.

Joyner told CNBC the move comes "out of a position of strength", pointing to a recovery in Aetna's Medicare business. He told analysts that the benefits of linking the pharmacy and the benefit manager would be "preserved in commercial agreements".

There is also a political backdrop. Pharmacy benefit managers face bipartisan scrutiny over opaque pricing, and Tennessee and Arkansas have passed laws to ban common ownership of PBMs and pharmacies. CVS and others are challenging those laws in court.

The same morning, CVS reported third-quarter sales of $108.4bn, up from $102.9bn a year earlier and ahead of forecasts.

*Image: CVS Pharmacy in Oakland, California. Photo: Thomasfan1916 / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0*

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