“I feel like we have a high degree of confidence that we caught the trend for 2025 bids.”

In context

“Lisa Gill: Thanks very much, good morning Karen and Tom. I just wanted to start with the health benefits business. If I go back to last quarter and we talked about the level of visibility that you had around cost trends, and then I heard your comments, Karen, that as you closed Q2, the trend accelerated, so really two questions here. One, can you talk about the level of visibility that you have when we think about the trend going into the back half of the year, and then secondly, can you talk about what was included in the 2025 bids? You talked about your level of confidence that you have that you’re prudent in those bids, but if you were seeing the trend accelerate coming out of Q2, were you able to capture that in the bids for 2025? Karen Lynch: Yes Lisa, I’ll start with the 2025 bids. I feel like we have a high degree of confidence that we caught the trend for 2025 bids. We took a very prudent approach - we talked about that last quarter, relative to elevated trends and that we expected elevated trends for the rest of the year and into next year, so we feel very confident. I had a cross-enterprise team looking at the bids throughout the entire bid cycle, and we feel good that we’ll achieve the 100 to 200 basis points of margin recovery - that’s what we expect. Relative to utilization in the quarter, I’ll ask Tom to comment on that. Tom Cowhey: Hey Lisa. As you look at the trends, there is a lot of things going on inside the quarter. The first quarter re-stated quite positively. A lot of that, we think was a function of change. We actually saw some strong restatement in in-patient in first quarter trends, but then as we looked at what happened in the secon”