Matria's Health a Matter of Contention

To be fair, Carroll believes that Matria has been losing key executives -- including its finance and operating chiefs -- due to a "lack of golden handcuffs" rather than problems at the company. Still, Mengert has already left one health care company in a bind.

Pediatric Services of America (PSAI Quote) hired Mengert as its CFO in the mid-1990s. With Mengert handling finances, Pediatric Services gobbled up a number of smaller firms and reported record-breaking results over the next couple of years.

But investors wound up burned with news of a shocking quarterly loss in the summer of 1998. They sued Pediatric Services and its key executives, including Mengert, for allegedly deceiving them about the value of the company's receivables. The defendants settled the lawsuit in 2002 for $3.2 million, with the company's $3 million share of the penalty fully covered by insurance. In the meantime, Mengert resigned in 1999 "to pursue other interests," and the company's stock wound up delisted by Nasdaq the following year before it finally recovered.

Major Clients

CorSolutions had revamped its own management team by the time that Matria came along with a $445 million offer for the company.

"After devoting myself fully to CorSolutions as CEO for the past three years, I decided that the time was right for me to consider other opportunities," Richard Vance explained when vacating his post last August. "I know the future for CorSolutions is bright, and I am looking forward to what the future holds for me."

For CorSolutions, the future brought the loss of a major client -- Premera -- to rival Healthways (HWAY Quote) less than two weeks later. Premera dropped CorSolutions after the company came under fire for allegedly inflating its customer-satisfaction scores.

Premera's contract, worth an estimated 5.5% of CorSolutions' 2005 revenue, officially ended on Dec. 1. CorSolutions agreed to join forces with Matria shortly after that and finally opened its books to the public -- exposing additional risks -- just this month.