Pardon me but Finance 101 is a bit rusted here. Isn't GE supposed to hold 51% of Healthcare and sell the remaining 49% o n IPO to maximize value? Why sell 20% and spin the rest to shareholders?
How is it going to maximize value beside transferring 18 billion liability to Healthcare?
If holding less than 51%, GE wouldn't be able to consolidate Healthcare's profit into GE. Isn't that true?
The entire game is about cash and debt.
GE Corp gets to reduce the percentage of debt remaining with the other parts of the firm by loading up Healthcare with Pension obligations and corporate debt. This benefits the overall company excluding healthcare.
Next, Corporate gets to have incremental stock equity raised but under the disguise of a new public company which will in turn will be dilutive to current GE shareholders and allow corporate another way to get access to cash without a corporate level bond issuance or additional GE stock being issued.
Overall what Healthcare is going to do is help increase cash for GE at a time when they can’t issue debt, it will reduce the pension obligations and play into the simplicity story that Wall Street wants.
For Healthcare it will not be such a great deal as the biggest issue will become cash flow for the massive pile of debt they will begin having at their new businesses. The amount of debt and other obligations is the exact same reason that Consumer and Industrial was never spun off and instead sold in pieces.
There are a lot of questions in your comment. "Maximize Value" may mean GE getting as much cash in the door now to pay down debt. Or if future earnings will be better than current earnings, some shareholders may want to own more of the new company so that earnings get distributed directly to them versus passing through GE first which will probably never come back to them in dividends. Since healthcare is less long-cycle than aviation or power, consolidation may have been preferred for some to smooth out the quarters and cash flow, but that is easily parsed out with disclosures.