Hca Healthcare
What Hca Healthcare is up to now
New 08-16: still quiet — no HCA-specific development; the `hca-healthcare` thread remains last_seen 08-04, now 12 days stale. HCA carries no `posture` field in board.yaml at all (unlike the five insurance/capital actors below, it was never assigned one) — flagged as a possible new dormant candidate in this pass's board proposals rather than applied here. Checked threads.yaml (hca-healthcare thread still last_seen 08-04) and this week's digests — no new HCA-specific development since the 08-04 crawl. Standing read holds unchanged: six AI initiatives live at 130+ hospitals (Timpani staffing/scheduling with Palantir, Google-built Nurse Handoff, ambient documentation, GE HealthCare maternal-fetal integration), labor friction earlier-stage than Kaiser's (one NUHW protest, 04-18, no complaint or strike), the securities-fraud probe confirmed unrelated to AI, and "AI" still absent from HCA's own Q2 2026 10-Q.
as of 2026-08-16
The provider archetype — 186 hospitals; free to allocate capital, rate-constrained on revenue.
The metrics
- Posture high
- expanding 2 src →
- Capital · available high
- ~$1.0B cash — runs deliberately LEAN; 'available' capital is debt-capacity + ~$12.6B/yr operating cash flow, not a cash pile 1 src →
- Capital · operating high
- ~$75.6B FY25 revenue (~$78.0B TTM); operating cash flow ~$12.6B FY25 (strongest cash conversion of the group) 1 src →
- Capital · deployed high
- ~$4.9B capex + ~$10.1B buybacks committed FY25 — capex builds capacity, buybacks are debt-funded returns 1 src →
- Capital · in high
- inflows — ~$75.6B FY25 patient-service revenue from ~186 hospitals + ~2,000 care sites (commercial + Medicare + Medicaid mix) 1 src →
- Capital · out high
- outflows — labor + supply operating costs, then ~$10.1B buybacks + ~$0.7B dividends + debt service on ~$48-52B FY25 1 src →
- Optionality high
- free (leveraged) — the FREEST capital allocator of the health nodes: for-profit, no MLR cap, buybacks the lever; only its revenue is rate-constrained (payer contracts + labor cost). The … 1 src →
- Gravity med
- GROSS ~$75.6B/yr routed — ~186 hospitals + ~2,000 sites of care across 21 states + the UK; the largest for-profit hospital network (provider-side care capacity). 1 src →
This week — what changed
- HCA Healthcare eliminated more than 200 IT and support jobs on 09-02, relocating some to Hyderabad, and now expects the exchange-subsidy hit to reach $1.0-1.2 billion for the year. This is the payer-mix strand HCA's AI Scale-Up already tracks, not the AI-staffing one — no coverage mentions Timpani or Palantir. Second round of 2026 cuts after May. (Nashville Banner, WKRN)