If you've followed me, you've probably noticed that I've been on a nostalgia kick, looking up some companies I covered as an analyst quite a few years ago. Sad to say, I'm batting about 50% among the venture-backed companies I was watching in 2003 - but at least for each one that folded, another underwent a successful acquisition. Success, mind you, means the VCs made a profit; but how are the acquirers doing today?

One early-stage company that caught my eye back then was Centerre Healthcare Corp., which was still operating out of an incubator and had raised $7 million in VC as of late 2002. It had seven employees at the time, with a business model of running inpatient rehab centers inside hospitals.

Centerre seems to have flourished for a decade; by 2012, Modern Healthcare was calling it one of 'Healthcare's Hottest.' By 2012 its model had evolved to running freestanding offsite rehab facilities in partnership with acute-care hospitals. Centerre was up to 840 employees and had annual revenue in 2011 of $56.3 million, owning five rehab centers with four more under construction.

Enter Kindred Healthcare (KND). In January of 2015 it finalized its acquisition of Centerre for $195 million; by then, Centerre had 11 rehab centers and 1600 employees.

At the time of the acquisition, Kindred had recently restructured from a primary focus on post-acute-care hospitals and services (skilled nursing facilities, rehab centers, transitional care hospitals, plus home care) to a focus on care management, exiting markets where it did not have all the pieces of continuum of care in place. The Centerre acquisition was seen as beefing up the rehab component of that continuum in the markets that both KND and Centerre served.

So how's that working out?

Well ... not great. Kindred's more recent shift in focus, with an emphasis on home health care, originally seemed if not prescient certainly well-timed, given the aging Baby Boomer population and the desire to reduce inpatient expenditures by insurers. Its stock took a big hit after a negative earnings surprise at the end of 2016, but had recouped, hitting a year's high of $11.90 in early July - and then came the mini-apocalypse. On July 25, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services announced that it would be cutting funding for home health agencies by $1.3 billion. Kindred's stock (as that of its competitors) dropped 15% immediately and has continued to decline, all the way back down to $7.10 yesterday.

What didn't help at all was KND's latest quarterly report in early August of 2017, which showed a final loss of $409 million, with second-quarter revenues down 4.6%. Most of that loss was from discontinued operations. On the plus side, revenues from its Kindred At Home division, which is now the country's largest provider of in-home, hospice and community care, was up, exceeding expectations.

So how does an individual investor figure out where KND might go next? In short, I don't think you do. I think this is one you leave to the big boys. Although the 4.3% dividend yield may look tempting, the payout ratio is -8%, which means it has to dive into the balance sheet to pay those dividends. No wonder analysts aren't discussing it.

Almost 91% of Kindred is owned by institutional investors, and another 4+% by insiders. Not many hedge funds are invested, according to Austin Wood, (who luckily for me put out a nice analysis just before I finished writing this report!), which is good news, since other institutional investors are more likely to stick with it for the long haul.

If you were to be one of the 5% of owners who are individual investors, you would be just along for the ride on what looks like a mighty bumpy road. Which may also be why there's been little public analysis available in the last couple of years. I think it's safe to say that a return to the three-year-ago high of $26.26 isn't in the cards. Even the month-ago high of $11.90 looks out of reach to me, but then again I don't know all the plans and facts. Maybe the institutions do; I would leave this one to them.