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

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Sam Hazen: So, our hiring in 2022 was up a little north of 6%, just a huge number of new hires. And so that’s the total number just as a starting point. Where that is coming from, that’s coming from new grads. There still is a decent pipeline of new graduate nurses in our communities. We have academic partnerships with different colleges beyond Galen that are important to that pipeline. We are also seeing some travelers decide that, okay, enough, we traveled, we want to come back, and we have been able to recover some of the employees who traveled for a period of time back into our organization. So, we continue to be focused on trying to recover them. And I think again, with our benefits and with our wage adjustments and all the investments we are making in clinical education and other components of our labor agenda, we are starting to see more favorable trends in our recruitment function that we think, if they carry into 2023 and through the year, should be positive for us.

Lance Wilkes: Thanks.

Operator: Our next question comes from Jason Cassorla with Citigroup.

Jason Cassorla: Great. Thanks for taking the question. I just wanted to ask a bit more on your capital priorities. You have recently divested ownership in some hospitals. But just wondering how you are viewing the M&A backdrop and if you are seeing opportunities to increase your footprint in your current markets or potentially entering into new markets? And then just on share repurchases, you have increased your authorization by $3 billion, you have $4.5 billion rough remaining. It’s just in light of the $7 billion this year. Just curious how you are thinking about share repurchases in the context of your larger capital deployment priorities? Thanks.

Bill Rutherford: Yes, let me take that. This is Bill. Let me take the latter one first. I think share repurchases, you spend an important part of our overall balanced capital allocation. As you mentioned, we did $7 billion in €˜22. We will have authorization close to $4.5 billion. I think we would plan on completing the majority of it sometime in this calendar year with a little bit of roll forward afterwards. And again, we will continue to adjust as kind of market conditions present, but a share repurchase program has just been part of our overall balanced allocation of capital going forward.

Sam Hazen: For M&A, we have been fairly active in the market with outpatient acquisitions again when they come available, whether it’s urgent care, some freestanding emergency room, some ASC, some physician clinics and so forth. And those are very complementary, synergistic to our network acquisitions, and we will continue to pursue those as they develop. We have not had too many opportunities on hospital acquisitions. Although, recently there was an announced LOI on a hospital just outside of the Dallas-Fort Worth market that we think is synergistic with respect to clinical services and so forth with our system in Dallas-Fort Worth. So, we will continue to look for those. We do have a pipeline of Greenfield hospitals because the acquisition environment is not as robust end market as maybe we would have hoped.

So, we need to consider Greenfield projects, and we do have a number of those that are in the works. We have one under construction currently in San Antonio. And I want to say we have seven or eight parcels of land, maybe 10, that are designed for future hospital development when the time is right for us to make those investments.

Operator: Our next question comes from Steven Valiquette with Barclays.

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