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

Kevin Fischbeck : I want to follow up on the comment that redetermination is going as expected. It seems like when you read some of the news articles that things are going — fielding kicked off faster. Obviously, the administration is stepping in, which implies that things are going maybe a little bit faster. We’d love just to kind of hear how you’re thinking about it? What it exactly means to have this delay? Would you expect the pace to change dramatically? Or have you changed your view about the pace of enrollment losses through the year? And is this slowdown of the administration is pushing? Is it more about the timing of how things go the rest of this year? Or do you think that ultimately, it will change that the number of people who get redetermined to often see enrollment?

Sarah London : Thanks, Kevin. Yes, we had always anticipated upfront bolus of redeterminations just because of the fact that there were certain states that were moving faster than others and others that had taken a more ratable approach. So I think the idea that there is a big amount of upfront data is helpful, but not unexpected. And then that has also given us some visibility into where there may be data issues that are causing — or sort of the procedural disenrollments are higher than the states might have originally been expecting. In aggregate, though, as we said, our membership is on track with our expectations. We are recapturing members who fell off, but still have eligibility. And because of all of the outreach efforts we’re making, we’re able to bring those members back on and track the fact that we’re able to successfully reenroll them.

And again, we do expect that number to grow over the course of the program. Relative to the CMS intervention, our view is that CMS has provided great flexibility for the states to go a little bit slower. Obviously, in recent weeks, they’ve taken a bit of a stronger stance relative to a certain cohort of states, but it’s still too early to see whether that will have a major impact on the slope. Obviously, they’ve asked certain states to pause for a month in other states, they’re looking to extend the grace period relative to members replying to enrollment requests. And so again, hard to say whether that’s a slowdown to make sure that states are getting the process right, so that they can continue at pace or whether for those states that quick out of the gate, it slows them down overall and what that does to the slope line, but that’s something we’re obviously going to be tracking very closely over the next couple of months.

Drew Asher: Yes. And then just one last data point. The ultimate sort of roll-off of redeterminations, our view hasn’t changed. Still about 65% of what we grew since the onset of the pandemic. 3.6 million members would have been the growth. So 65% of that rolling off would be 2.3 million to 2.4 million members, about $9.5 billion to $10 billion of cumulative revenue. So that’s already factored into the numbers we gave in Q1, the $77 billion, for instance, of forecasted Medicaid premium.

Operator: And our next question today comes from Scott Fidel with Stephens.

Scott Fidel : I appreciate all the details that you gave us on some of the dynamics in the Marketplace. May be helpful to just to bring it up to sort of the high level if you wanted to share, what type of commercial MLR you’re now sort of embedding in the 2023 guide and then in the 2024 floor of at least $6.60? And then inside of that, definitely appreciate the conservatism around some of these receivables from some of these plants out there that are in a tough condition. Would you be willing to maybe just give us a little insight into how you sort of develop that $350 million reduction in terms of sort of, I guess, how that breaks down between Friday and bright? Or just how your methodology works is it just sort of a general level of conservatism that you’re building in there?