$900M Disaster: How Centerbridge Drained GoHealth

In the summer of 2020, two men sold their company to the public for more than six billion dollars. The company was called GoHealth — and here is the first strange thing about that sale: within days, roughly six hundred million dollars of the money the public had just put in flowed straight back out, to the people who had just sold it. The public bought the shares. The owners took the cash. Hold onto that, because everything that follows is the story of how they got away with it — and who was left to pay the bill.

Because GoHealth did not sell software, or sneakers. More than sixty million Americans are on Medicare, and every autumn almost all of them face the same maze: dozens of plans, fine print no human can read, a hard deadline, and a decision that can cost you thousands of dollars — or the doctor you've trusted for twenty years — if you choose wrong. So you call the number on the screen. A warm voice picks up and promises to help you find the right plan, for free. GoHealth was that voice. And in May of 2025, the United States government accused it of a quiet betrayal of the very people it claimed to serve: the Justice Department alleged that brokers like GoHealth had taken hundreds of millions of dollars in secret payments from insurance companies, and that in exchange they steered seniors toward whichever plan paid the broker the most — whether or not it was right for the person on the phone.

I want to be precise, because precision is the whole brand here: those are allegations, not yet proven in court, and GoHealth has disputed them. But hold the shape of it in your mind, because the rest of this story only makes sense once you understand what this company actually sold. It did not sell insurance. It sold the act of choosing. And the government says the choosing was for sale.

On June 7, 2026, GoHealth filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in Delaware. By then its revenue had fallen ninety-five percent in a single year. It was carrying more than seven hundred million dollars in loans, at an interest rate near fifteen percent. A company once valued at more than six billion dollars on the stock market was worth pennies a share — a wipeout of about ninety-nine percent for anyone who had believed the story and bought in. And yet — here is the number to keep in the back of your mind, because we end on it — the people who built this company and sold it to the public did not go down with it. Years before the bankruptcy, at the very top of the market, the owners took roughly six hundred and eight million dollars off the table, in a matter of days. We will get to exactly how, and exactly who got it. But to understand how the money got out, you first have to understand how it got in.

It starts in Chicago, in 2001, with two friends. Clint Jones and Brandon Cruz were in their twenties when they founded a little insurance brokerage. The timing, in hindsight, was extraordinary. They had stumbled into the exact seam where the largest government program in American life was quietly being handed over to private companies.

Here is the thing most people don't realize about Medicare. More than half of the seniors on it no longer get the classic government version. They get Medicare Advantage — a private plan, sold by a private insurer like Humana or Aetna, paid for with public money. And those insurers will pay handsomely to acquire a new member, because once you're enrolled, the government check arrives every month for years. So an entire industry grew up in the middle: brokers who, for a commission, would match a confused senior with a plan. GoHealth became one of the biggest of them. It built call centers and a technology platform, hired thousands of licensed agents, and put itself between sixty million anxious people and the insurers who would pay to reach them. By the late 2010s it was running hundreds of millions of dollars through that platform a year. It looked, from the outside, like a genuine growth company riding a genuine demographic wave. And that appearance — fast growth, recurring revenue, a story about helping seniors — is exactly what made it a target.

Because in September of 2019, the people who buy companies like this arrived. A private-equity firm called Centerbridge Partners took control of GoHealth in a deal that valued it at around one and a half billion dollars. Now, Centerbridge did not buy GoHealth to run a call center for the next thirty years. Private equity has a clock, and the clock is short — buy, dress it up, and sell it on, ideally within a few years, for more than you paid. And in 2019, with the Medicare Advantage boom in full roar and the stock market hungry for growth, there was an obvious exit waiting: take it public.

So that is what they did. On July 15, 2020 — in the middle of a pandemic, with the market climbing anyway — GoHealth held its initial public offering. It sold shares to the public at twenty-one dollars apiece and raised nine hundred and thirteen million dollars. On paper, the company was now valued at about six and a half billion dollars. Two friends from Chicago had built something worth more than six billion dollars. That is the headline. Watch what happens underneath it.

When most people hear that a company raised nine hundred million dollars in an IPO, they assume the money goes into the company — new hires, new technology, growth. Follow this one. Of the money raised, roughly five hundred million dollars was used, within days, not to grow GoHealth, but to buy out the stakes of the people who already owned it. Another hundred million went to retire a special class of insider payout. Add it up, and about six hundred and eight million dollars of the money the public put in flowed straight back out to the pre-IPO owners — Centerbridge, the founders, and the other early investors. The public bought the shares. The insiders took the cash. And the company — the actual business, with its call centers and its agents — kept the bill.

Because the other half of the trick is the debt. To engineer all of this, GoHealth had been loaded with borrowed money, and that debt stayed on the company's books long after the insiders had been paid. From the moment the IPO closed, GoHealth was no longer just a brokerage. It was a brokerage carrying a heavy loan, owned by people who had already gotten their money out, and now had to generate enough cash to service that debt — every quarter, in the good years and the bad. So the pressure was on. The company had to grow, and grow fast, no matter what. And that is the pressure that bends a business. Because here is the question the whole company now turned on: how do you make a free phone call worth billions, fast enough to feed a stock price and a debt load at the same time?

The answer was volume, and the answer was commissions. GoHealth made its money when it enrolled someone in a plan. The more enrollments, the more commission. And the most valuable enrollment of all was the one that could be booked again — a member who switched plans, year after year, generating a fresh commission each time. In the industry there is a clean word for it: churn. A senior moved from one plan to another isn't always a senior helped. Sometimes it's just a commission, harvested again. And the incentive to keep that wheel spinning ran in exactly the opposite direction from the senior's actual interest, which is usually to find one good plan and stay in it.

This is the soil the government's allegation grew in. In its 2025 complaint, the Justice Department alleged that between 2016 and 2021, major insurers paid hundreds of millions of dollars in what amounted to kickbacks to the largest brokers — GoHealth among those named — and that in return, those brokers steered beneficiaries toward the insurers who paid, regardless of whether the plan was the best fit. The complaint went further still, alleging that some insurers pressured brokers to enroll fewer disabled beneficiaries — people who are more expensive to cover — which, if true, means the steering wasn't only about money flowing one way; it was about quietly deciding who got helped at all. Again: these are allegations, contested, unproven in court. But you do not need the verdict to see the machine. A company under pressure to grow, paid by the insurer rather than the customer, profiting from churn — that is a business whose incentives point away from the very people it promised to serve. The promise was a free guide through the maze. The structure was a sales funnel pointed at whoever paid the most.

And for a while, the machine ran hot enough to hide the strain. But it could not run forever — because the thing about churn is that you eventually run out of road, and the thing about a debt-loaded company is that the moment growth slows, the debt stops being a background hum and becomes the loudest thing in the room.

The slowdown came fast. Regulators began tightening the rules around exactly the high-pressure marketing the whole industry ran on. The cost of acquiring each new member climbed. The easy enrollments got harder. And then came the number that gave it away: in the first quarter of 2022, GoHealth's net loss ballooned to around thirty-seven million dollars — roughly six times its loss a year earlier. A company that had sold itself to the public as a growth story was now losing money faster than it could explain it away. That August, it laid off around eight hundred people — about a fifth of its entire workforce. And the founder who had built it, Clint Jones, was pushed out of the chief executive's chair. The growth story the public had paid six and a half billion dollars for was coming apart — and the debt taken on to enrich the insiders was still sitting there, compounding, indifferent to all of it.

From there, the line only bends one way. By the full year of 2025, GoHealth's revenue had fallen to about three hundred and sixty million dollars — down more than half in a single year — and the company posted a net loss of nearly five hundred million dollars. The most damning detail is in the engine of the business: its "non-agency" revenue, one of its core lines, collapsed by more than eighty percent. The platform that had been worth billions was now generating almost nothing. And then came the first quarter of 2026, and the number that ends any argument about whether this was a soft patch or a death. Revenue for the quarter: eleven point nine million dollars — down ninety-five percent from the year before. A company built to run hundreds of millions of dollars a year was now barely running at all. The debt, meanwhile, had not shrunk. It had grown to more than seven hundred million dollars at an interest rate near fifteen percent — a number a healthy, growing company can carry, and a dying one cannot. On June 7, 2026, exactly four years to the day after that founder was pushed out of the top job, GoHealth filed for bankruptcy.

So now read the receipt, because this is the whole point. When the company went into bankruptcy, the shares were worth about twenty-two cents — down from the twenty-one dollars the public paid at the IPO. Ninety-nine percent gone. Every ordinary investor who believed the story — that this was a growth company helping America's seniors — was nearly wiped out. The employees who lost their jobs got severance, if they were lucky, and a line in a bankruptcy filing. And the seniors — the sixty million people the company existed to serve — were left to wonder, every one of them who'd ever taken that free phone call, whether the plan they ended up in was chosen for them, or for the commission.

And who walked away whole? The people who got their money out at the top. Centerbridge, the founders, and the other pre-IPO investors had taken roughly six hundred and eight million dollars off the table at the IPO in 2020 — real cash, paid by the public, gone years before the bankruptcy and untouchable by it. They had bought a brokerage, dressed it in a growth story, sold that story to ordinary investors at a six-billion-dollar valuation, taken their cash, and left the company holding the debt and the lawsuits. By the letter of it, nothing here was necessarily illegal — the IPO use-of-proceeds was disclosed in the fine print for anyone who read three hundred pages of a prospectus. That is the quiet genius of it. The mechanism that moved six hundred million dollars from the public to the insiders was printed, in plain sight, in a document almost no one reads.

GoHealth promised sixty million seniors that it would help them choose. In the end, the most important choice in the whole story was made long before any of them picked up the phone — the choice, by the people who owned the company, about who would get the money and who would get the bill. They chose themselves. Everyone else just found out later.