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Encompass Health runs inpatient rehabilitation hospitals that help people recover after strokes, accidents, and surgeries.
Encompass Health is one of the largest owners of inpatient rehabilitation hospitals in the United States. These are not ordinary hospitals. They are places where someone who just had a stroke, a bad car accident, or a hip replacement goes to spend two or three weeks rebuilding strength and relearning basic things like walking and dressing. The company runs roughly 170 hospitals across about 40 states, plus a growing home health and hospice arm that sends nurses and therapists into patients' homes. Most of the bill goes to Medicare and Medicaid, with private insurance picking up the rest. Think of it as the rehab floor of a hospital, spun off into its own nationwide business.
The money math is straightforward. Inpatient rehab brings in the large majority of revenue, somewhere around three-quarters of the total, with home health and hospice making up most of the rest. Revenue in recent years has been running near $5 billion and climbing at a steady high-single-digit pace, helped by new hospitals opening and older ones filling more beds. The business also throws off a lot of cash. Management uses that cash to build new hospitals, buy smaller operators, pay a dividend, and buy back stock. The company was formerly known as HealthSouth and went through a famous accounting scandal in the early 2000s before cleaning up and renaming itself Encompass Health in 2018. It later spun off its home health and hospice unit into a separate company called Enhabit, though Encompass still holds a piece of it.
What makes the business sturdy is that demand does not really depend on the economy. People have strokes and break bones in good times and bad. Medicare pays the bills, so the customer is essentially the government plus private insurers. The main risks are reimbursement cuts, labor shortages among nurses and therapists, and the cost of building new hospitals, which takes years and lots of capital. Still, as the U.S. population ages, more people will need exactly this kind of care, and Encompass is one of the few companies with the scale to serve them.
Saved answer · last researched 11 Oct 2026