“We are comfortable with current consensus and within that, we are making the requisite investments needed to accelerate our returns in 2026 and to position our company for meaningfully stronger growth in 2027 and beyond.”

In context

“rter, our debt-to-capital ratio remained stable at 44.1%, reflecting continued actions to improve cash efficiency, offset by the completion of the Amedisys transaction late in the third quarter which represented a net cash disbursement of $3.4 billion. We expect our debt-to-capital ratio to trend closer to 40% in the second half of 2026. Accordingly, while we have not finalized plans for 2026, we anticipate we may be in a position to reinstate our historical capital deployment practices later in the year. Finally, we generated operating cash flow from operations of $5.9 billion. We still expect to close this year with $16 billion in operating cash flow or 1.1x net income. Looking ahead to 2026. As Steve mentioned, we will provide formal guidance with our fourth quarter results in January. We are comfortable with current consensus and within that, we are making the requisite investments needed to accelerate our returns in 2026 and to position our company for meaningfully stronger growth in 2027 and beyond. We are optimistic in our ability to execute on our 2026 plans, but there are remaining headwinds we will have to overcome. Items to keep in mind include, we're entering the final year of V28, which represents a more than $6 billion headwind to the overall enterprise. As you heard from Tim and Patrick, we've taken numerous actions around benefit design, cost control and member engagement to substantially offset this impact. Further investment in Optum Health and Optum Insight is needed and we are accelerating some of those investments as noted in our third quarter results. We are also accelerating our pace of AI applications to fundamentally advance a vast spectrum of processes and capabilities we expect will structurally improve our enterprise performance. Our effective tax rate is expect”