Cigna Corporation (NYSE:CI) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

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So any dislocation in 2024, we deem to be manageable with the strong performing portfolio that we have in front of us.

Operator: Our next question comes from Mr. Justin Lake with Wolfe Research.

Justin Lake : Just want to follow up first on the membership guide. Just any color on the pricing of that membership, how much comes in Q1 versus the rest of the year? And then healthcare margins certainly been a lot better there in 2022. Just wondering what ballpark you’re expecting to be in 2023 there relative to your long-term guidance?

David Cordani : Justin, a little color relative to pacing and then I’ll ask Brian to talk about more to your second question. As Brian noted, we have good visibility into the membership volume. And when you think about the — outside of the individual exchange business, what we’ve seen growth across all of our funding types. Still the lion’s share of it is ASO including the service-based relationship with a large customer. So in essence, a meaningful portion of that volume will be realized in the first quarter of 2023, and then they’ll be puts and takes throughout the course of the year. We’ll look forward to providing you updates on. Now individual lines of business will move throughout the course of the year. But by and large, if you think about — our expectation is that we’ll have good performance relative to that on the first quarter of the year and then some puts and takes throughout the course of the year with some additional growth and maybe some additional disenrollment as we factored in some impact in our outlook for a bit of an uptick in disenrollment as we look at the current fragility of the U.S. economy.

So good visibility for Q1. I’ll ask Brian to talk a bit more around the margin.

Brian Evanko : Good morning, Justin. So as it relates to the Cigna Healthcare margin profile, we’re first off, really pleased to have finished 2022 with the 9% Cigna Healthcare margin, which is 90 basis points of year-over-year expansion which allowed us to return to the low end of our target margin range of 9% to 10%. So this stronger-than-expected 2022 performance certainly increases our confidence in executing against our ’23 margin goals. As I noted in my prepared comments earlier, we will see some product mix shift in 2023, specifically with the government lines becoming a slightly larger percent of premium within Cigna Healthcare, and these products tend to carry a lower profit margin profile than the U.S. Commercial and International Health products.

So when you consider all of this and our continued investments in our accelerated growth platforms such as MA, we’d expect our 2023 Cigna Healthcare margins to land within our target 9% to 10% range, but at the low end.

Operator: Our next question comes from Ms. Lisa Gill with JPMorgan.

Lisa Gill : I just wanted to come back to the PBM. David, you made a comment that HUMIRA would be on the formulary and parity with the biosimilar. Just curious as we think about AbbVie potentially increasing the rebates around that product? Is it better for the PBM if it shifts to the biosimilar? Or are contracts now set up in a way that you’re going to share in the overall cost savings where it doesn’t really matter. And then secondly, when we think about plan design, anything of note when we think about pharmacy benefit for 2023?

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