Acadia Healthcare Company, Inc. (NASDAQ:ACHC) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

David Duckworth: Yes. The — as we think about the SWB impact from the reserve adjustment, where that adjustment went on our P&L was actually in other operating expenses, which is where we have our interest expense. And so, just thinking about it more from a margin perspective and other operating expenses, that metric as a percentage of revenue for the fourth quarter was 13.9%. And without that reserve adjustment, would have been 13.0%. So that’s the impact that it had on that line item and had about a 0.9% impact on margin as well.

Kieran Ryan: That’s helpful. Thank you. And then, just on the 2023 EBITDA outlook, could you just — are you able to break out how much of the change there is due to discretionary investments and facility openings versus just the wage pressure, which seems to kind of hold in pretty high there in 4Q in the high single digits? Thank you.

David Duckworth: Yes. I mean, our expectation continues to be for those new facilities which do carry some startup losses in the near-term, but are an important driver of longer-term value creation and earnings growth for the company. But our expectation for 2023 is that, those new facilities would still be in the $15 million to $20 million range in terms of where their start-up losses should run. That always depends on just the timing and number of new facilities that we have. But that $15 million to $20 million continues to be our estimate for annual start-up losses of our new facilities.

Kieran Ryan: Thank you.

David Duckworth: Thank you.

Operator: And our next question will come from John Ransom with Raymond James. Please go ahead.

John Ransom: Hi. Good morning. Just a couple on the reimbursement side, I have one and then a follow-up. So, if we’re looking at apples-to-apples just pure rate, 2023 over 2022, how should we think about just the pure rate updates affecting your revenue per day percentage growth? Thanks.

David Duckworth: Yes. John, we have a — I’d say, compared to December, we have a more positive outlook around reimbursement. Of course, we always go in with expectations for rate increases in the mid-single-digit range. It’s what we’ve seen throughout 2022. And based on inflation and other factors, I expect to see that for most of our payers going forward. But I want to remain cautious, just knowing, we have a lot of different payers that we contract with. But as we have more recently just thought about what the year looks like from a revenue per day perspective, we are expecting on average 3% to 5%, but do feel like in the early part of the year we have a higher level of visibility that we should sustain growth in the higher end of that range so closer to that 5%.

The reason for that is a lot of our contracting with Medicaid plans. Over 75% actually of our Medicaid revenue is contracted in the second half of the year which means, as we go through the first part of this year, we can see the rate increases that we received over the second half of the year that carry into the first half of this year. And then the focus is on, renegotiating with those payers in advance of next year’s contract date. So I do feel like we have higher visibility now. We saw a lot of success across our different facilities markets and payers throughout 2022. And hope that that continues in the mid-single-digit range and have visibility we think that it will through the first part of the year. A little more caution just built into the second part of the year where we may see it at the lower-end, but we’ll obviously stay focused on that.

I think we still have opportunities just building some caution into our outlook for the later part of the year.