Blackstone-owned TeamHealth has received a pair of competing offers from two of its biggest creditors that are giving the struggling physician-staffing company starkly different options to repay over $1 billion in debt due next year, WSJ Pro Bankruptcy reported. Pacific Investment Management Co., which is known as Pimco and is the largest holder of TeamHealth’s loans maturing in February, has proposed swapping those loans for new debt backed by some of the company’s assets, such as its accounts receivable from government entities like Medicare. The plan would allow TeamHealth to avoid defaulting on its debts but would give Pimco first dibs on some of TeamHealth’s assets if it went bankrupt, a major advantage relative to other creditors. Ares Management, which holds hundreds of millions of dollars of the company’s bonds, has a different plan: It has requested that Blackstone, TeamHealth’s private-equity backer since 2016, kick in around $250 million of new money to TeamHealth, the people said. Combined with new debts Ares would provide, the funds would help TeamHealth pay down loans due next year. Ares’s deal doesn’t disadvantage any lenders or strip them of their collateral.
