“From a tailwind perspective, our repricing efforts will be a catalyst for earnings growth as we begin returning to our long-term target margins with particularly solid year-over-year results expected in our Commercial and Medicare businesses.”

In context

“'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 expected to return to a more normalized level in 2026 as compared to 2025. And finally, investment income should continue to move lower as interest rates decline. From a tailwind perspective, our repricing efforts will be a catalyst for earnings growth as we begin returning to our long-term target margins with particularly solid year-over-year results expected in our Commercial and Medicare businesses. We also expect stability and a measured return to growth in our Optum entities, with aspects of that growth being reinvested in the business, specifically Optum Health and Optum Insight. These investments may slow 2026 growth, but should accelerate growth in 2027, more in line with historical expectations. We will be paying down debt and identifying opportunities to further reduce our interest expense as a result of the declining rate environment. And finally, we're taking an aggressive step on affordability initiatives that should improve overall medical trend relative to our pricing. While we have a number of moving parts to manage for the remainder of this year, we also have concrete plans to execute on all the items we discussed this morning that will position us for the type of growt”