Cigna CEO David Cordani: 3 quotes on Express Scripts deal

Health insurer Cigna is slated to acquire pharmacy benefits manager Express Scripts in a $67 billion deal that includes $15 billion of debt. Cigna CEO David Cordani spoke with Business Insider about the transaction and its intended effects on the American healthcare system.

Here are three quotes from Mr. Cordani:

1. "As we look at all of our business including in the United States, we see that still the No. 1 need for Americans is to improve affordability and to do so in a very personalized fashion. Pharmaceutical services have quickly grown to about 25 percent of the overall cost equation, with specialty pharmacy being about two-thirds of that 25 percent and about half of that is in the medical part of the promise. So, it presents an opportunity to further improve affordability."

2. Mr. Cordani said the deal expands Cigna's distribution reach: "There's a lot of ways in which Express Scripts distributes to employers, health plans or governmental agencies that we don't. So it expands our distribution reach to touch more lives with our behavioral services, our well-being services. So, improve affordability and personalization for our clients and customers, improve quality, and then expand reach, or touch more lives."

3. "I was with the Express Scripts team on Monday of this week, all day in St. Louis, meeting with colleagues ... and there's a deep passion of community-based orientation. When you have those ingredients and an open mindedness relative to sustained innovation, success is possible. If you're not commercially oriented, if you're not consumer-oriented, if you don't deeply respect the clinical community, if you're not community-oriented, if you don't have the empathy and humanity in your coworkers — we have 47,000 colleagues, they have 27,000 colleagues, it's tough to be a service company. So that fiber is quite important and both companies share that fiber."

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