“But we still feel like we're going to have a much heavier weighting of our growth outside of the annual enrollment period from February to December.”

In context

“Medicare environment, selling environment is highly competitive. And we probably saw one of the more aggressive years of pricing that we've ever seen in the 2024 session. We guided at investor conference to growth of 450,000 to 550,000 lives, which is a little bit more modest than we have grown in past years, but it's reflective of our response to the new risk model changes, what we saw in outpatient utilization patterns early in '23 and reflecting that into 2024 pricing. And as we close out AEP, I would say that we were a little bit light against what we were thinking, kind of, end of November. Most of that actually is in the group business, some of the very aggressive benefits, a little bit more switching, drove some of our term rates a bit higher in AEP than we were initially thinking. But we still feel like we're going to have a much heavier weighting of our growth outside of the annual enrollment period from February to December. And this is really just a continuation of a trend that we have seen play out over the last five years really. And in fact, last year, we drove 430,000 lives of growth or about 60% of our total growth in the period from February to December. This is a portion of the selling season that we really do well in given our large dual footprint and also the fact that some of the selling and AEP tends to be focused on some of those headline benefits that have been really aggressively positioned. And throughout the remainder of the year, there tends to be some switching back as folks think more deeply about things like network, the fulfillment of supplemental benefits, overall service and delivery of product. So I guess the headline is it is a very aggressive marketplace this year. We feel like we'r”