CVS Health announced it will split in two, with the separation planned for the first half of 2028. A new spinoff, to be called CVS Pharmacy, will hold the conglomerate's roughly 9,000 retail pharmacies, in-store clinics, and a warehouse-based mail-order prescription operation.

The second company will keep the CVS Health name and house the insurer Aetna, the pharmacy benefit manager Caremark, and businesses providing home visits and primary care to older people.

According to The New York Post, the entity retaining the CVS Health name will be led by current CEO David Joyner, and shares rose 1.2% in extended trading on the news.

The move reverses the strategy behind the roughly $78 billion Aetna acquisition in 2018 that created the integrated healthcare giant.

The split is a striking about-face for a company that spent nearly a decade reaching into every corner of American healthcare.

The 2018 CVS-Aetna merger — and Cigna's purchase of Express Scripts the same year — kicked off an era in which each major conglomerate came to encompass an insurer, a giant PBM, and a mail-order pharmacy.

Yet the integration never met Wall Street's growth demands: The New York Times reports that at the end of 2024 the company's market value fell to its lowest level in over a decade, though it has since rebounded.

According to The New York Post, CVS had already explored a potential breakup in 2024, and shares have recovered under Joyner to a market value of about $117 billion. Critics argue the conglomerates steer patients toward their own pharmacies and profit from conflicts across their web of businesses.

The breakup arrives amid mounting scrutiny from lawmakers and regulators who say CVS and its peers, UnitedHealth Group and Cigna, have grown too dominant and driven up medical costs while stifling competition.

The New York Times reports that within the past two years, Arkansas and Tennessee each passed laws aimed at preventing the conglomerates from managing prescription benefits while running retail and mail-order pharmacies, and lawmakers in Washington and other states from both parties have proposed similar legislation that the conglomerates have fiercely opposed.

The political spotlight on PBMs' role in the drug supply chain has intensified pressure on companies that combine insurance, drug-benefit management, and pharmacy operations — the very structure CVS now intends to dismantle.

The financial stakes are enormous: CVS generated over $400 billion in revenue last year, ranking seventh among U.S. public companies according to FactSet, a financial data provider cited by The New York Times.

The New York Post reports the company's 2025 revenue reached a record $402.1 billion, up 7.8% from the prior year.

Many investors view the Caremark pharmacy benefit manager as the shining jewel of the portfolio, while the retail pharmacy business faces dimming prospects amid changing consumer habits and industry-wide challenges that have shuttered other major chains like Rite Aid.

The planned breakup would formally end the conglomerate era begun with the Aetna merger, dividing a company that once aimed to own the whole patient journey into an insurer-and-PBM business and a struggling but ubiquitous retail operation.