Operator: The next question comes from David Larsen with BTIG.
David Larsen: Can you talk a little bit about your care coordination software solution? I think it’s really interesting how you can compare prices at different providers, hospitals for different procedures that ties in perfectly with like the needs of high deductible account members might have. I think it ties in great with what health plans are trying to accomplish. How many plans is that deployed to how many plans is that deployed to, please? And just any thoughts on like the uptake rate of it and the impact it can have on total cost trend?
James Lucania: So let me say first and we tried to make this distinction at Investor Day. This item is still in beta. So it’s the deployment today is very limited. And I would describe it more as a feature in my mind than a product. And the reason I say this is that is as follows. There are people who’ve tried to build businesses out of this as you well know. And for the most part, they have failed. And certainly in the public markets, they have not done well. And the way we’ve approached it is the view that you can get 80% of the benefit with 20% of the stuff now that you have the benefits of ML for the business logic and generative AI, for the UI to some extent. And so that’s what we’re really trying to do, and we’re going to try and do this across multiple applications.
And we’re not, I don’t really think of it as a unique threat to the businesses that are in that space. They’re going to face that threat one way or the other. And so our approach is to partner. So this, for example, this solution is, as we said at Investor Day, is it’s not, it’s us being able to access some of that logic, through APIs and the like and then also access some of the ML and AI services to kind of make it as good as we can. So I guess I’ll just say, one, this is something that’s in beta. Two, I would look at it as principally as a source of support for competitive differentiation versus it’s going to be in the near-term it’s own revenue line. We will, I think, ultimately have some kind of a broad analytics and services business that we’ll talk about more.
We began to talk about it at Investor Day, but it’s early for that. And so I think the way I’d look at it is exactly as you said, which is I think it’s good strong feature, and it’s an ability to deliver something that people want in a way that’s easier for them to consume and that’s ultimately less expensive than it’s been delivered in the past, which would mean it’s going to be made more available. The last part of your question, David, about sort of the impact on broader health care trend, here’s my view. Again, I will say as someone who’s been part of and observed the battles about all of the massive, all the ways that people have that are supposedly going to bend trend, which for the most part haven’t done squat over the years. Here’s an interesting fact.
When and I’m sorry for the long answer, but we did keep the earlier comment short, the prepared ones. When you, if you look at, healthcare as a percentage of, U.S. GDP, in 2010, it was 17.2%, and the projection was that by now, it would be ’24. It’s still 17. Right? Nobody talks about that, but it’s true. What happened? What changed? It’s not I mean, the Affordable Care Act did a bunch of good things in my view, but it did not do much to bend the cost curve. That was not the objective. It enhanced access. The biggest change that’s occurred over that period of time has been 2 things. One is, the incremental involvement of consumers in healthcare and the second is the reduction in cost of many of the everyday type pharmaceuticals and procedures that we do, in part because consumers are involved, in part because of the of all of the push towards generics and the like, even if obviously there are certain drugs that are extensive.
And, so the way I look at it is, it’s not that any of these tools per se bends the trend. It’s that they all make the involvement of consumers more effective. And that in the whole is what has a positive effect on the trend among other things. And so that’s the way we look at it. And when I look at our clients who have been most effective and tried the hardest to utilize tools effectively over the course of not 1 year or 2 years, but 5 years or 10 years or in the case of I think about one client that we’ve had now for 17 years. It’s not like special, and it doesn’t have only a young population and all that kind of stuff. It’s not a high-tech type situation. They’ve been successful at holding healthcare inflation through CPI and not just when CPI was 6%, right?
Or 8.4 or whatever it was in last year. And so, you can do this. And it’s not going to be the magic that that heals all of healthcare, but it’s absolutely part of the toolbox. And our job is to, we didn’t create this tool, but we can sharpen it. And in doing so, we sharpen every other tool, whether that tool is wellness program, transparency type stuff, telemedicine, whatever it may be, generics. What we do sharpens every one of those tools, and that’s how we help bend the trend, which ultimately makes healthcare more affordable and by helping people understand it, makes them better uses of it.
