Centene Corporation (NYSE:CNC) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Sarah London : Thanks for the questions, Justin. I’ll take the first one, and then turn it over to Drew. We’re still a little bit early relative to cut points. So again, that 85% target for October of ’25, then to your point, revenue year ’26, we’re seeing really solid improvement as I pointed to in terms of 2/3 of our membership moving in contract improvement year-over-year. Directionally and again, it’s still — the numbers are not final, but just to give you a sense, if we — this year, we’re sitting in about 50% of plans that are in 3 star or above. We expect that to be around 90% of members in 3-star or better come October. And so the exact numbers that fall in 3 or 3.5 really depends on those cut points that we don’t have yet, but just so you understand sort of the magnitude of directional improvement that we’re tracking.

Drew Asher: Justin, I tried to give you all the inputs, but let me do some math to you — for you. So last quarter, we said $128 billion for next year’s revenue. Obviously, we’ll refine that as we get through the year. So if you multiply that by 14%, that’s $18 billion. Our Medicare segment includes MA and PDP, PDPs in the zone of a couple of billion. So you can get down to about $16 billion of MA revenue. And if you did the same exercise for this year, we’d be in the zone of $20 billion in MA revenue. And then part 3 was the third quarter rates. Yes, they’re sort of — they’re consistent with our expectation. They’re all over the board because when we’re — if you’re deep into a payable risk corridor in a state, then ultimately, they’re going to recalibrate the rates to that.

Although there’s no net impact to the company if we’re in the corridor. So it’s not that instructive to go through, and we never go state by state. But let me just step up to a higher level and say we’ve been working well with our states. And the typical back and forth with states on the non-acuity parts of rates and call that normal course.

Operator: And our next question today comes from Lance Wilkes with Bernstein.

Lance Wilkes : Great. Just a couple of questions on kind of capital deployment and raising capital. As far as the MA business, could you talk a little bit about variability of profitability by geography? And obviously, part of that would be, are there opportunities to maybe sell off portions of that business, lower performing portions or whatnot? And I guess related in the other direction is, you mentioned M&A pipeline. Just interested in what the priorities are as you’re looking at deploying capital?

Sarah London : Yes. Thanks, Lance, for the question. So relative to Medicare Advantage, I think our view is, to your point, we take a geography-by-geography approach to looking at that portfolio. Our lens is through big construction as we look at ’24 and ’25 and where there are less profitable products that we’ve put out there. And we talked about this on the Q1 call, but we’ve been very focused as we constructed ’24 bids on this idea that there are less profitable or less aligned products, and that’s where we are sort of aggressively pruning. So directionally aligned, but not through the lens of divestiture, more through the lens of rightsizing and realigning the MA book overall to create that solid platform for growth and the synergy that it provides with the focus on lower income and complex members to our Medicaid footprint.

And then for the M&A pipeline, again, we continue to be focused on opportunities that are — we consider sort of right down the fairway, relative to our three core business lines, that being our primary focus, but also acknowledging that we have two strong and important retail businesses, which is how we think about Marketplace and Medicare and the platform that we think Marketplace provides in terms of long-term growth relative to what we’re seeing from gig workers, contract workers, ICRA and sort of burdening individual Marketplace, what are some of the capabilities that we think are going to be important to own those distinctive competencies. And so those are also part of the consideration in the overall M&A pipeline.