CI - The Cigna Group (CI) BofA Securities 2024 Health Care Conference Call Transcript
2024-05-15 21:04:09 ET
The Cigna Group (CI)
BofA Securities 2024 Health Care Conference Call
May 15, 2024 02:40 pm ET
Company Participants
Brian Evanko - CFO of The Cigna Group, President and CEO of Cigna Healthcare
Hasan Riaz - Lead Principal, Investor Relations
Ralph Giacobbe - Head of Investor Relations
Conference Call Participants
Kevin Fischbeck - Bank of America
Presentation
Kevin Fischbeck
All right. I want to thank everyone for joining us today. It's my pleasure to be hosting The Cigna Group. Presenting today, we have Brian Evanko, who is the CFO of the company as well as President and CEO of Cigna Healthcare. We also have Hasan Riaz and Ralph Giacobbe for the company as well in the audience.
So I think we should jump right into Q&A. I guess maybe take us -- one of the things that we're trying to figure out here at the conference is just kind of the backdrop for utilization. There's a lot of moving pieces and seems like some degree, different points of view about where we are in the utilization perspective. Can you just talk a little bit about what you're seeing utilization, I guess, first in the core commercial book but then also any color on the Medicare Advantage side as well?
Brian Evanko
Sure, Kevin. And thanks to you and Bank of America for hosting us here this week. As it relates to utilization, in 2023 across the board, we saw strong levels of utilization in our Cigna Healthcare health plan book, which is something we had priced for, guided for and included in our projections. And so as a result of that, you would have seen we had a strong year in Cigna Healthcare in 2023. The MCR performance was strong. The revenue growth was strong, in spite of what were elevated levels of utilization compared to 2020, 2021, 2022. So '23 was a stronger year of utilization.
As we stepped into '24, we assumed those strong levels of utilization would continue through the entire year. So our pricing anticipated that, our guidance anticipated that and our projections did as well. So we are pleased with our first quarter results coming in better than expectations in Cigna Healthcare, where the MCR was better than we had projected and also the income was ahead of expectations, which again we come back to the firm pricing that we've had in the market, 2024 reflecting that utilization, is consistent with what we experienced in the first quarter. So far, the second quarter is largely in line with what we had expected coming out of the first quarter, which again is persistently high utilization levels relative to what we had in '23....
The Cigna Group (CI) BofA Securities 2024 Health Care Conference Call Transcript