HedgeCo.Net — Bon Secours Mercy Health, one of the largest not-for-profit health systems in the United States, is in late-stage talks to buy a majority stake in Bain Capital-backed Surgery Partners in a take-private that would value the outpatient surgery operator at roughly $6 billion including debt, the Financial Times reported on Sunday, citing people familiar with the matter. The deal could be announced as early as Monday, according to the report, which Reuters also carried.
The proposed terms value Surgery Partners at about $20 a share, a premium of roughly 26% to its last close, according to Reuters’ calculation using LSEG data. The roughly $6 billion enterprise value includes about $3.5 billion of debt. Bain Capital, a shareholder since 2017 and the company’s largest investor, would keep its stake of almost 40% as part of the transaction. Surgery Partners shares rose about 20% in overnight trading after the report, RTTNews said. Bon Secours and Surgery Partners did not immediately respond to requests for comment, and Bain declined to comment, according to the reports.
The talks would close out more than a year of stop-start sale efforts. In June 2025, a special committee of Surgery Partners’ independent directors ended discussions over Bain’s non-binding proposal to buy the shares it did not already own, concluding in a regulatory filing that the company’s prospects as an independent public company exceeded the value of the offer. Bain’s earlier attempt to buy the whole company was pitched at a higher valuation, about $6.7 billion of enterprise value, according to the FT. The shares have fallen about 31% over the past year.
The buyer is the notable part of the structure. Bon Secours runs 47 hospitals across the United States and Ireland and generated about $14 billion of revenue last year, according to the report, and Surgery Partners would give it 176 surgery centers and hospitals across 30 states. The approach follows Ascension’s roughly $3.9 billion agreement earlier this year to buy surgery-center operator Amsurg, a sign that large not-for-profit systems are now competing with sponsors for outpatient assets that move procedures out of hospitals.
For private equity, the reported arrangement is a partial exit rather than a clean one. Bain would retain a large minority position alongside a strategic majority owner, keeping exposure to the outpatient growth story while the public float disappears. If the deal is signed on the reported terms, allocators will watch how the price compares with Bain’s own earlier proposal and whether more sponsor-held healthcare services businesses find non-profit health systems on the other side of the table.