Reiterating comments he first made last fall, Humana Inc. President and CEO Jim Rechtin recently told investors and analysts that he is more focused on margin than the top line.

Speaking after Louisville-based Humana reported its first-quarter results late last month, Rechtin said his team’s top goal is to hit a net profit margin of 3% in 2028. Getting there, he said, requires making solid progress with bids for 2027 contracts—including by trimming some benefits because of the small planned payment rate increase from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

Next in line behind that profitability improvement is retaining as many insurance plan members as possible, Rechtin said.

“The third priority is growth and that’s a distant third priority. If we happen to grow some, great, but the priority is not growth.” he added. “The priorities [are] No. 1, being on track for 2028; and No. 2, retaining the members that we have. Because, again, churn is expensive and we want to minimize churn the most we can.”

Rechtin outlined this approach last November, when Humana and its fellow insurance companies were dealing with cost pressures from both rising utilization rates and higher acuity. For many, the response has been to cut some benefits or leave some market areas. On Humana’s first-quarter earnings call, President of Insurance George Renaudin said Humana is following those strategies this year as it looks to 2027 and beyond.

Also on the Q1 call, Rechtin and his team said they’re still integrating Humana’s acquisition of The Villages Health, which last year added about 32,000 people to the company’s CenterWell Primary Care network, and have started work on doing the same with MaxHealth, another Florida primary-care group Humana bought in February for $908 million.

MaxHealth, which comprised three ventures rolled up under the umbrella of private equity firm Arsenal Capital Partners, owned 54 owned primary care clinics and four specialty/ancillary clinics in West and South Florida. It also had affiliations with 24 clinics and served more than 120,000 patients, more than 80,000 patients of whom are in value-based care programs of the kind CenterWell specializes in.

The deal added about 530 people, including more than 100 providers and more than 30 specialists to Humana and gets the company close to its 2026 target of growing CenterWell’s patient base by 120,000 to 140,000 people from the roughly 500,000 with which it ended last year.

Hospital firm Nutex wants to ramp construction

The directors of Nutex Health Inc. have approved a plan to have the hospital management company start directly investing in the development and building of facilities, a change Chairman and CEO Thomas Vo will let his team build a more stable and cost-efficient growth pipeline.

Until now, Houston-based Nutex routed its real estate development through third parties who teamed up with physician partners. The company today runs 27 micro- or specialty hospitals in 12 states and is on track to open facilities in San Antonio, Jacksonville and West Little Rock, Arkansas, before the end of this year. Each of the company’s projects costs between $20 million and $30 million and Vo said the current pipeline for 2027 envisions the addition of four or five facilities.

Nutex could start investing in some of those but the goal is to look beyond and create the internal processes to lets his team consistently open three to five hospitals annually.

“There will be an option for all the developers to come in and invest with us. And so all that is still open at this point,” Vo added. “The whole reason we’re doing this […] is to, No. 1, ensure a steady pipeline as well as decrease costs and ensure that the pipeline remains robust.”

In the three months that ended March 31, Nutex generated a net profit of $46.8 million on total revenues of $216 million. The company’s gross profit fell to $91.7 million from $118 million in early 2025 but the company booked a stock-based compensation gain of nearly $4 million compared to paying out more than $27 million in the prior-year quarter. A smaller tax bill also helped the bottom line.

PE firm inks deal for staffing provider Cross Country

Private equity firm Knox Lane has signed a deal to pay $437 million for staffing firm Cross Country Healthcare and expects to close on its purchase in the third quarter.

Cross Country leaders estimate they have about 2.5% of the healthcare staffing market, which is stabilizing after shrinking significantly after the COVID pandemic receded. Among its clients are UConn Health, Children’s Hospital Colorado and Vanderbilt Health

“Knox Lane truly appreciates our iconic brand and the strength of our platform, especially the proprietary technology we’ve built on four decades of real‑world experience,” said Kevin Clark, the chairman and CEO of Cross Country, which he helped found nearly four decades ago. “That foundation uniquely positions organizations to design, predict, and optimize labor strategies with market‑leading precision. Just as important, Knox Lane recognizes the exceptional team behind it all.”

The deal with Knox Lane comes after Cross Country’s revenues slid from more than $2.8 billion in 2022 to $1.05 billion last year as clients pulled back on nurse, allied and physician staffing post-COVID. The company lost nearly $110 million in 2024 and 2025 after posting a net profit of more than $72 million in 2023.

Former President and CEO John Martins in late 2024 worked up a deal to sell Cross Country to San Diego-based Aya Healthcare for $615 million. But Aya pulled the plug on that agreement on Dec. 3 of last year and Martins left Cross Country 11 days later, leading the board to reinstate Clark as CEO in addition to chairman.

A native of Belgium, Geert De Lombaerde has more than two decades of business journalism experience and writes about markets and economic trends for Endeavor Business Media publications Healthcare Innovation, IndustryWeek, FleetOwner, Oil & Gas Journal and T&D World. With a degree in journalism from the University of Missouri, he began his reporting career at the Business Courier in Cincinnati and later was managing editor and editor of the Nashville Business Journal. Most recently, he oversaw the online and print products of the Nashville Post for more than a decade and reported primarily on Middle Tennessee’s finance sector as well as many of its publicly traded companies.