“We remain committed to maintaining our current investment-grade ratings and expect our leverage to return to more normalized levels as we execute on margin recovery in the Aetna business.”

In context

“ht for investors is that we took a restructuring charge of nearly $1.2 billion in the quarter. This amount reflects several components, including impairment charges for approximately 270 stores we expect to close in 2025, costs related to the discontinuation of non-core businesses, and costs associated with workforce optimization. Shifting now to cash flow and the balance sheet, for our third quarter we generated year-to-date cash flow from operations of approximately $7.2 billion. During the quarter, we returned $837 million to shareholders through our quarterly dividend and we ended the quarter with approximately $1.2 billion of cash at the parent and unrestricted subsidiaries. Our leverage ratio at the end of the quarter was approximately 4.6 times, which is above our long term target. We remain committed to maintaining our current investment-grade ratings and expect our leverage to return to more normalized levels as we execute on margin recovery in the Aetna business. As David mentioned, we are not providing a formal outlook for 2024 at this stage; however, we would like to provide some directional commentary to help you better understand how we see the moving parts. Starting with our health services and pharmacy and consumer wellness segments, as we have previously highlighted, those businesses continue to deliver strong results. In PCW, while the immunization season got off to a stronger start than we expected, shifting demand into the third quarter, strong script growth continues to give us confidence in the previous outlook we share with investors. In the health services segment, Caremark’s earnings progression in 2024 started slow but has steadily built momentum over the second and third quarters. While we maintain a cautious outlook on our health”