Publicly Held eHealth Purchases Medicare.com For $4.8 Million

eHealth, Inc. (NASDAQ: EHTH) announced they acquired the Medicare.com for $4.8 Million Dollars in the first Quarter of 2014.

Although Medicare.com wasn’t just a simple domain name its pretty clear from the conference call the company bought Medicare.com just for the domain.

During the earnings call, there was some interesting clarifications:

Tobey Sommer of SunTrust asked this question during the earnings call:

“”How is eHealth ranking in search for Medicare now and what would you expect the purchase of Medicare.com to do — take advantage of those 3 million Medicare people becoming Medicare eligible? Thanks”

“”Gary Lauer answered on behalf of the company:

“Medicare.com is a really important property which we were frankly delighted to be able to acquire. Obviously the government exchange is healthcare.gov and in fact if you go to Medicare.com you will see that it’s operated by us and in fact we have been running it now for several weeks. ”

“Although we weren’t running it — even with those strong application growth volumes that we have in the first quarter, most of that was without Medicare.com. That’s a very recent acquisition and something we just started. That certainly — we think that’s going to have some really positive impact of this Medicare business throughout the year as well as during the annual enrollment period and I can’t tell you at the moment where we’re ranking in Medicare but we certainly source a growing volume of applications from search. As Medicare.com is going to help us significantly there as well.

In his follow up question Mr.Sommer asked:

“Just a housekeeping detail, you mentioned the purchase price but I didn’t quite catch it, could you repeat that for me?

“Stuart Huizinga asked on behalf of the company:

“Yes it’s 4.5 million in cash and $300,000 of forgiven receivable from them.”

Great sale

Congrats to the Seller and eHealth