Brian Thompson : Yes. Thanks, Justin, for that question. Throughout the pandemic, we’ve been making these references to baselines, et cetera. I think, now being three years into this pandemic, I’d like to just ground an anchor more to our expectations as COVID has waned. And what I’m most encouraged by is that the fourth quarter played out as we had expected. And what we had set out inside our pricing trends are lining up really nicely as we look forward to 2023. To your comments around the flu, as I had suggested at our investor conference, we certainly saw that spike. We have now seen that start to wane for, I think, five consecutive weeks here as we’re moving forward. So to put it out like we had expected, really not a meaningful impact as I’m looking forward versus what we’ve planned for.
So what I’m most encouraged by is we’re sort of out of that zone of the unknowns around comparing to baselines, et cetera, and really managing a book of business with greater predictability back to sort of the expectations that we had well pre-pandemic and encouraged about how all of those elements, including flu, are lining up as we look forward. Thanks, Justin.
Andrew Witty : Thanks so much, Brian. And Justin, thanks for the question. Next question please?
Operator: We’ll take our next question from the line of Lance Wilkes with Bernstein.
Lance Wilkes : Yes. Could you talk a little bit about the employer segment? And what I’m interested in is what was pricing like in 2023? If you think of the 6% commercial trend that used to be your pre-pandemic sort of levels, what was that like? And for those employer customers, how are they kind of waiting the need to get employees in the war for talent versus focus on maybe higher premium costs and how they’re trying to control that?
Andrew Witty : Lance, thanks so much. Let me ask Brian to kick off on that.
Brian Thompson : Yes. Maybe I’ll start, and then I’ll hand it off to Dan Kueter. I’ll start with the conversation around trend. As you well know, we used to share trend information back in the day, and stopped doing so simply because it became less instructive as we were pacing through this COVID environment. What I can share, and I think once we get to this zone of consistency, we’ll return to those metrics, we’re certainly encouraged by what we’re seeing on the utilization front. I think we are seeing some durable shifts. We’ve seen it with respect to ER moving into urgent and in-patient to outpatient. But on the flip side, as we all know, in these labor markets, we’re seeing stronger unit costs. And as we all know, unit costs still comprise the majority of the overall trend.
And as I had suggested earlier in the year, we did have a higher trend planning for 2023 than 2022. But in reality, that was really a function of the first half of 2022. And again, I want to give that thought and belief that we are largely back to normal levels. And I think once we pace through 2023, we’ll get to that zone where we can share those pricing trends. So with that, maybe a little bit more on the competitive dynamic, Dan.
Dan Kueter: Yes. Thanks, Brian, and thanks for the question, Lance. The competitive dynamics in the commercial market remain the same as they’ve been, always competitive. We continue to price to our forward trend, and we have continued to do that. As Brian indicated, there has been some modifications to that, but all within the range of what we’ve expected and all within the range of how we’ve priced. So we don’t see any material deviations at all from what we’ve expected in our plan, so.
Andrew Witty: Thanks so much, Dan. Thanks, Lance. Next question?
