Molina Healthcare, Inc. (NYSE:MOH) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

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Can you give us a sense of what that might look like possibly if you’re not baking in the guidance? And do you have any view? I know there’s been a lot of discussion about how those redetermined lives when they come on the public exchanges might affect the risk pool, I’m assuming that net-net, because you don’t have anything in there, you think it would be a positive for you, even if maybe they’re a little sicker than your average person on the exchanges today. But anyway, just fleshing out some of the public exchange commentary.

Joe Zubretsky: Sure, A.J. The membership results starting the year with 290,000 members, finishing the year with 230,000 members. We’ll aggregate to about $1.6 billion in premium for the year. And that was fully in line with our expectations with respect to our pricing strategy. Look, we’re allocators of capital and this business has shown that due to the instability of the risk pool by the introduction of the special enrollment period and other factors that it does have some inherent volatility. There also has been some irrational pricing over the past couple of years. So pushing the pause button and going silver stable, in small was exactly the right approach and the business for 2023 has landed in a good place for us to achieve our mid-single digit margin target, if we conclude that the risk pool has stabilized due to the lack of government movement of the risk pool rules, pricing is rational, we likely would conclude to allocate more capital to this line of business and grow it again.

Mark, anything to add?

Mark Keim: Yeah, A.J., good morning. As Joe mentioned, starting off with 290,000 members going down, I think, to 230,000 by the end of the year, really exactly what we expected. We put 9% rate into the market this year. If you look at the mix of what we got and the pricing we put into the market, so with 9% not surprised with that result at all. Now you asked about the MLRs. To the extent we pick up folks from redetermination, I’m expecting the MLRs coming over to be quite consistent with our underwriting range. Those folks will not be new to health insurance. They will not be coming in with pent-up demand. So I’m expecting a pretty stable pool as they come over.

A.J. Rice: Okay. That’s great. Thanks a lot.

Operator: The next question comes from Justin Lake with Wolfe Research. Please go ahead.

Justin Lake: Thanks. Good morning. A couple of questions on the numbers side. First, on Medicaid membership, can you give us the membership? I know it’s going to be flat. You talked about some new growth of acquisitions offsetting redeterminations. Can you give us those numbers in terms of what you’re expecting there for each of those buckets? And then, how should we think about redeterminations from ’23 into 2024 in your mind? And then on the reserves, I’ve heard you talk about DCP and I saw in the release that you mentioned a bunch of payments in the quarter. I did go back and take a look at fourth quarter paid versus fourth quarter kind of reserved or medical costs, last year to this year, it didn’t look like there was a significant change in paid claims as a percentage of total in the fourth quarter of this year versus last year. So hoping you could just flesh that out a little bit in terms of what you were seeing there? Thanks.

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