Tenet Plans Hospital Divestiture

Tenet Healthcare Corp., Santa Barbara, Calif., has announced that it is seeking buyers for 27 hospitals that it plans to divest in a major restructuring effort.The company plans to focus its "financial and management resources" on 69 hospitals in 13 states. The properties to be divested include 19 in California and eight others in Louisiana, Massachusetts, Missouri, and Texas, the company said. Trevor Fetter, Tenet's president and chief executive officer, said the company had come to this decision after completing a review of the short- and long-term prospects for all its hospital properties, which enabled them to "assess the realistic potential of all our hospitals without the distortion caused by the unusually large Medicare outlier payments that resulted from the company's prior pricing strategy." The company said it expects to receive net proceeds of about $600 million from the divestiture, mostly in the form of tax benefits. Citigroup Global Markets and Banc of America Securities are the joint advisers for the sale.