Ladies and gentlemen, good afternoon, and welcome to the Clover House Third Quarter 2022 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen only mode. A question and answer session will follow the prepared remarks. As a reminder, today's call is being recorded. I would now like to turn the call with Ryan Schmidt, Investor Relations for Clover Health.
Please go ahead.
Good afternoon, everyone. Joining me on our call today to discuss the company's 3rd quarter results are Vivek Garapali, Clover Health's Chief Executive Officer Andrew Toy, the company's President and Scott Loeffler, our Chief Financial Officer. You can find today's press release and the accompanying supplemental slides in the Investor Events and Presentations section of our website at cloverhealth.com. This webcast is being recorded. Including in the Risk Factors section of our most recent Annual Report on Form 10 ks.
Information about non GAAP financial measures referenced, including a reconciliation of Those measures to GAAP measures can be found in the earnings materials available on our website. With that, I will now turn the call over to Vivek.
Thank you, Ryan, and thanks everyone for joining us today. Our wide network approach powered by Clover Assistant enabling great primary care helped deliver a solid set of results for the Q3. I'm proud of the hard work being done by everyone at Clover so far this year, Leading to consistently improving financial results in our insurance side of business and a maturation of our non insurance business. Importantly, I also believe that this quarter's results further illustrate our positive momentum towards achieving profitability. Before handing it over to Andrew, I would like to briefly touch on some key highlights from the Q3.
We delivered significant improvement in insurance MCR, Continued stability in adjusted SG and A spending and strong revenue and lives growth relative to the prior year period. Clover Assisting continues to be a key differentiator in our mission to improve every life by supporting physicians in catching and treating conditions earlier. We continue to see MCR performance that is over 1,000 basis points better for returning members whose PCPs use Clover Assistant As compared to members whose PCPs do not, we believe this differential in MCR performance is evidence that Clover Assistant is in fact helping to improve clinical outcomes. Finally, I am pleased by our increased focus on operational excellence at Clover, which contributed to our maintaining 3.5 stars on our flagship PPO plan. We look forward to continued execution against our strategies as we head into 2023.
With that, I will turn the call over to Andrew.
Thanks, Sibeth. It really is exciting to see the results of our hard work manifest an increasing momentum across the Our Q3 results were highlighted by significant improvement in our insurance MCR to 86.3 percent And I am excited to see that our focus on sustainable insurance operations, bringing Clover Assistant to more doctors and our consistent improvement of Clover Assistant's Therefore, our 2022 results are not yet reflective of the favorable impact that we expect from being paid on 3.5 Beginning in 2023. Furthermore, we recently announced maintaining the 3.5 star rating for 1 dollar a year, Continuing the favorable revenue effect into 2024. While some uncertainty exists We now expect a range of 93% to 94% favorably updated from the previous range of 95% to 99%. We believe our Clover Assistant enabled model gives us a structural advantage over other industry participants allowing for profitable above market However, it is a well understood attribute of MA plans that new members typically represent a headwind to MCR As it takes a year or 2 to comprehensively diagnose health conditions and bring members under care management.
This transition period for new members As our business matures, we've adopted a more balanced philosophy, emphasizing not just growth, but profitable growth. To be clear, we expect to continue to grow membership above market rates, but we also expect overall growth in Live that will be lower than previous years. We intend to accomplish this balance through a combination of tweaks to plan design, Growing our core markets versus expansion and further focusing our marketing spend. With regard specifically to 2023, We believe that the current A and P season will be especially competitive with some of our competitors improving their benefits in an attempt to come in line with our offering. That said, while others can try to match our insurance plans, we believe they lack the ability to manage care on a wide physician network, which is what Clover Assisted affords us.
Turning now to our non insurance segment. Our Q3 non insurance MCR was 104.2%, which is a result that we intend to improve. ACO Reach is an innovative program And its rules and benchmark rates continue to be adjusted by CMMI resulting in some amount of unpredictability. Given the program environment and the learning from our participants, we have modified our ACO to target an MCR lowered than 100% next year and has made adjustments to the number of physicians participating in the 8 year reach program. Despite having many new applicants for 2023 that would have allowed for substantial program growth, We have decided to instead significantly decrease the total number of participating physicians.
We believe this will reduce total attributed life This line was at MCR below 100%. To be clear, we continue to strongly believe in Clover Assistant being used for the For the physicians who we will not be admitting to our ACO in 2023, We are exploring alternate opportunities to support them in shifting their fee for service population onto value based care. For example, we are looking at potentially partnering with them on existing statutory programs such as the Medicare Shared Savings Program. We believe these other programs could be a very good fit for a number of these positions and we will provide more updates here as they come about. With that, I will now hand it to Scott for the financial update.
Thanks, Andrew. I'll first cover the Q3 And then review our updated 2022 outlook. I also want to echo that I am proud of Clover's performance this year And look forward to building upon our positive momentum next year when we're paid at 3.5 stars on our flagship PPO plan. As Vivek and Andrew mentioned, Our Q3 results were highlighted by significant improvement in insurance MCR, which improved to 86.3% this quarter from 102.5 percent in Q3 of last year. This improvement was driven by favorability in underlying trends as our portfolio continues to mature.
Our year to date insurance MCR through Q3 Also demonstrates the meaningful improvement over a more extended period with Q3 year to date MCR improving to 91.7% from In general, we won't be sharing prior period development in our results. That said, the insurance MCR does reflect favorability from prior periods and we don't view 86.3% As a go forward run rate, we do feel that our full year guidance range of 93% to 94% It's a fair representation of the overall underlying run rate of the business in 2022. This sets us up to do well in 2023 When we layer in the incremental benefits of being paid on 3.5 stars, maturation of our portfolio and other operational tailwinds. Our non insurance MCR was 104.2 percent elevated versus Q3 of 2021. As Andrew mentioned, we're excited about the changes we're making to the program, which we believe will result in an MCR below 100% for the non insurance line in 2023.
During the Q3, insurance and non insurance revenue growth of 32% And 163%, respectively, was driven by growth in lives under management, resulting in total revenue of 8 $157,000,000 and net medical claims incurred of $840,000,000 Looking forward to 2023, We expect the insurance line to continue to grow at above market rates, although somewhat moderated from recent years. In addition, the decision to reduce the scale of participation in the ACO program will result in a reduction of our non insurance revenue By up to 2 thirds. As Andrew mentioned, we still expect non insurance to be a $1,000,000,000 revenue line of business. Both of these changes are reflective of our increasing emphasis on profitability and will drive continued improvement in MCR and adjusted EBITDA performance, Ultimately driving us towards profitability. 3rd quarter adjusted SG and A, which we previously referred to as adjusted operating quarter and down nearly 800 basis points year over year.
This quarter represents another proof point That we are being prudent in spend decisions to complement our increasing focus on profitability. Our net loss for the quarter was $75,300,000 compared to $34,500,000 loss in Q3 of 2021. Adjusted EBITDA for the Q3 was negative $58,300,000 improving significantly from a loss of $79,700,000 in the prior year period. Our consolidated cash, cash equivalents and investments totaled $783,000,000 Cash, cash equivalents and investments of the parent company and unregulated subsidiaries was $416,000,000 Note that we received both the September October MA payments from CMS in the month of September, causing Q3 cash to be elevated by about $96,000,000 at the regulated entity level. This effect will normalize in Q4.
Regarding capital requirements, we are in a strong liquidity position and we continue to see no immediate need to raise new capital. Our focus on improving MCRs for both lines of business should help delay any requirement for additional capital, At least through 2023 and potentially beyond. Finally, I'll provide an overview of our updated guidance. As a result of another strong quarter and favorable momentum, we are updating our guidance for the full year 2022 to include an improved insurance MCR range of 93% to 94%. Total revenues are expected to be in the range of $3,200,000,000 to $3,400,000,000 This includes projected insurance revenue of $1,000,000,000 to $1,100,000,000 and non insurance revenue of $2,200,000,000 to $2,300,000,000 Insurance membership is expected to average 86,000 to 87,000 lines and non insurance beneficiaries are expected to be 165,000 to 170,000 aligned beneficiaries on average.
We estimate that full year non GAAP adjusted SG and A will be between $320,000,000 $330,000,000 representing adjusted SG and A as a percentage of revenue between 9% 10%. Furthermore, While we are not providing explicit standalone guidance for the Q4 of 2022, we do expect Q4 For revenue for each line of business to be similar to our results in this Q3. In conclusion, We recorded strong financial results during the Q3 with a meaningfully improved insurance MCR, coupled with strong insurance revenue and lives growth and great operational execution, which will benefit us in the future. We will look to build upon this positive momentum as we head into 2023. Now let me turn the call over to Vivek for some closing comments.
Thank you, Scott. First, a big thank you to the entire Clover team And all of the extremely hard work that has led to a very good quarter. The continued evolution of Clover Systems is having a bigger and bigger impact on our results, I believe that trend will only continue. This will be my last earnings call as CEO, so I thought it would be good to lay out a few thoughts on the long term. Firstly, Andrew's transition to CEO is going extremely well and there's no better person and leader to be at the helm of Clover for the next many years to And speaking as the largest Clover shareholder, I am very confident he will deliver for me and for all of our current and future shareholders in ways that will be spectacular And shocking in a good way over the next many years.
Now looking ahead, firstly, it's important to remember that the public and private markets I'm yet to see a healthcare company achieve a positive disruptive impact at scale versus just a slice of it. It simply never happened before And has occurred in other industries, consumer retail at Amazon, phones with Apple, knowledge acquisition at Google, entertainment with Netflix, Cars with Tesla, space travel with SpaceX, short distance travel with Uber and hotels with Airbnb, healthcare, education and energy production Our 3 industries with positive disruptive impact at scale has not yet been proven out. Until that occurs, shareholders, current and future, Should expect and embrace the skepticism that we face. The human mind is not geared to believe something that has not yet been proven. Our job at Clover is to demonstrate that proof.
Healthcare is a vast and complicated system. I've been fortunate to be a part of building and investing in businesses At all stages of life cycle across outpatient, hospital, provider, revenue cycle, medical device, data, technology and therapeutics, Domestic and international as well as many businesses outside of healthcare. This experience provides me with a helpful vantage point And unusually wide perspective of what works, what doesn't and what is and isn't sustainable. Many healthcare prognosticators out there have knowledge of 1 or 2 areas, But very rarely across many, that limitation we have is a natural advantage to the team at Clover. One conclusion I've come to over the years is that the vast majority of the public market value of healthcare companies today has been created on the back of medical cost inflation.
Said more simply, Healthcare cost inflation in excess of GDP growth has accrued to mass market value, plain and simple. That is not sustainable and we are hitting the proverbial wall over the next decade with that dependency. Any investor who believes it will be straightforward for large And small companies to pivot from a business model of benefiting from medical cost inflation to a model benefiting from medical cost reduction It was not only wrong, but also delusional and has likely never tried to pivot a business in that seismic of a fashion. I will boil it down to 3 areas as to how costs can and will be reduced over the long term for the benefit of patients and taxpayers. To my vantage point, I would be very surprised if 3 things I'm about to describe do not manifest itself within the next 10 years.
Firstly, Less than 1% of acute care hospital services take place in the home. In 10 years, that number will be at least 10% and more likely 30% or higher. That will dramatically lower the cost structure of hospital admissions and have tremendous negative cost structure implications for hospitals themselves. 2nd, A significant amount of healthcare technology being developed today has nothing to do with aiding clinicians and making better clinical decisions. Yes, mistreatment options veering off of evidence based protocols, clinical errors and knowing when to do something and when not to do something are what actually drives costs up.
In 10 years, the most valuable healthcare technology companies will be driving true clinical intelligence to clinicians. Healthcare technology companies that are not driving impact in this way will be extremely challenged in 10 years. Finally, A minority of therapeutics coming to market today are truly curative. A decade ago, that number was near 0 and a decade from now, The majority will indeed be curative. We will enter an era where an incremental dollar of therapeutic spend will lower medical costs by greater than a dollar.
Therapeutics coming up today are tied to development breakthroughs made 10 years ago. And in 10 years, therapeutics will be tied to breakthroughs developed today. There are many other areas of cost reduction opportunity, automation, streamlined regulations, better incentives alignment, better access, etcetera, But the 3 I described will have massive implications. What does that mean for Clover? What we built in Clover Home Care to date And what is to come over the next many years in Clover Home Care will be a game changer.
It would be an understatement to say that I'm extremely excited about our long term plans for this area. For Healthcare Technology, a huge portion of our R and D spend is around the Clover Assistant and clinical intelligence for Our progress to date has been impressive and for various reasons will only accelerate. Our first foray into therapeutics Our spin out company, Character Biosciences, formerly Clover Therapeutics. Character has initially focused on AMD and is off to a very promising start. In 10 years, I strongly believe that it is possible for Clover to have made the biggest positive impact in healthcare, while simultaneously accruing the largest market value in in excess of any healthcare company that exists today.
Their journey there, while having already been very volatile over the last 10 years, We'll only continue to be so. We are in the extremely early innings and I'm excited for Andrew to lead us on this next and extremely important phase. When I look across the Healthcare CEO landscape and my top three list of where value will accrue, it's obvious
In the interest of time, we ask that you please limit yourself to one question and one quick follow-up. We'll take our first question from Jason Casperla from Citi.
Great. Thanks. Good evening, guys. Just wanted to start with the decision to scale back your non insurance business with the ACO REACH program. Just Can you discuss that decision a bit more?
What the main drivers of that movement away from where you were with the direct contracting? And then maybe just high level, could you give More detail into the potential other areas for Clover Systems such as the MSSP perhaps and how your participation in those types of programs could differ from
Yes, absolutely. Thanks for the question. So as you said, that we are very Excited about our presence in fee for service. We've seen a lot of data about how Clover system performs well within the fee for service environment and physicians are really enjoying using it for A majority of the Medicare panel, what we are moving away from is having the entirety of our people service presence come from the CNMI Graham, the direct contracting now ACA Reach program, which is not yet a statutory program. What that means is that those rules can still change, rates are being tweaked, The model is being adjusted.
So we still intend to be one of the larger participants in that program, but we're very excited to Then fee for service into other areas too. Like you said, NSSP is already statutory. Its rules are much more defined. We'll vacate this much more defined like it is on the Medicare Advantage side. And we think we've identified from our data is a lot of Position 2 will do well in that particular program as well.
So you'll see us move away from having everyone in fee for service just in ACO reach and then we'll discuss more about launching into And having a blended portfolio for fee for service, and we'll talk more about that in the future.
Okay. Got it. And then I guess just as a follow-up here, just couple I just wanted to go back to your commentary on how you're thinking about 'twenty three, right, including the benefit from this year's star performance and revenue. I think for next year, I think You flagged that before in the past as a 300 to 500 basis point benefit to insurance MCR. So just any confirmation there?
And then any early thoughts Into cost trend expectations for MA, the improvement on insurance margin, just any other puts and takes that we need to be mindful of as you Try to go for profitability generation and balancing that between growth and profits. Thanks.
Jason, thanks for the question. This is Scott speaking. So, yes, there's a number of different drivers that we Going into 2023 that we think will take us from our what we think is a significantly improved performance and run rate here in 2022. I think that we mentioned in our comments earlier that we view the run rate coming out of 2022 as being more or less in line with full year 'twenty two guidance of 93% to 94% in terms of the insurance line MCR. You're right.
We have made comments in the past around the incremental impacts from the 3.5 being paid on 3.5 stars as being 300 to 500 basis points. And then we do expect some incremental impact from operational improvements and continued expansion of CA. At this point, we're not ready to come out with Guidance are more detailed than that. We're just very excited about the momentum that we have coming into 2023.
Our next question comes from Richard Close from Canaccord Genuity.
Yes. Thanks for the question. Can you hear me okay?
We can hear you.
Yes.
Okay, great. Thanks. Sorry about that. Just as we're entering the AEP period for this year and you guys pulled back on the number of counties, new counties you were going after. Can you just Talk a little bit about how you're viewing the sales and marketing spend and effectiveness Of that, I know you said you're expecting maybe a little bit lower growth rate versus past years because of the competitiveness, but it's still above market rates.
But just if you could talk a little bit about the Annual enrollment period would be helpful.
Yes, definitely. So the way we think about Growth is we feel like growth is really a differentiator for us and that our ability to operate wide network product It's really core to our growth ability and then what we've demonstrated in the past is that that's really what Medicare eligibles want is that wide network. Clover Assistant lets us manage care on that wide network. So we've always spent not that much on marketing. We've always sort of tuned How we've looked at growth because we are able to grow without having to put a lot of capital into marketing.
So this year, we really are adjusting our growth rate, not because of competitiveness, Because the faster we grow, the more new members we have. And because it takes a year or 2 to bring them under care That provides a headwind to MTR and our path to profitability. So because we are absolutely focused On NTR, profitability and operating expenses, we decided to moderate growth a little bit and therefore that will provide Tailwind towards that pathway at our breakeven point.
Okay. That's helpful. And In the Q1, you provided some MCR on different regions and Southern New Jersey sort of Stuck out. Have you guys seen any improvements there over the last couple of quarters or any update you can provide?
Yes. Doctor. New Jersey definitely stuck out there. So we'll look forward to discussing this more early next year. Again, in that same vein there, the more returning members we have who are under Clover Assistant Management, that's where we see our model really come into its own.
So because we're tuning down growth a little bit this year and going into next season, we'll have more of those returning members, especially in South Jersey, In Georgia, and because that percentage of returning members will be higher, we expect to see significant improvements in NCR. Adam, we look forward to reporting more on that next year.
Okay. Thank
We'll take our next question from Kevin Fischbeck from Bank of America.
Great. Thanks. I wanted to understand a little bit more about the decision to scale back on DCE. I guess what in your experience has differentiated the doctor between one that's good and high performing and one that isn't? And then I guess When you say you're declining by 2 thirds, are those is that 1 third you're going to be with, are they already at your 100 MLR, and is there any G and A deleveraging to think about throughout this process?
Yes, Kevin. Thanks for the question. So a couple of different things. Not every single doctor is at that 100% MLR as they go through, but we have strong boonies that they engage Well, with the model, they have care management programs in place that are complementary to our care management programs. And so we really feel like there's a lot of tailwinds that have to Well, as they go into next year.
The other dimension that I would say here is that as the rules Change, like I'll give you a simple example. CMS continues to maintain the benchmark on a national basis. And that Nationally, different regions perform differently, which means that some doctors just have more of a headwind to perform even if they do deliver savings than other physicians. So we look at things like that. We look at Clover assisted engagement down to individual usage, physician usage.
We look at Care management synergies and with that algorithm, we could share them who we're going to estimate for next year.
And I also just wanted to
Pardon, Kevin?
Are you saying the G and A is there G and A deleveraging we should be thinking about from exiting this or is there not much incremental G and A that Get stranded as you shrink the size of that business.
I would say that there is some opportunity there and more broadly, we are looking across the entire To make sure that we're operating at the most efficient level and it's an area that we're going to prioritize as we get into 2023, just as part of our Overall, broader efforts towards profitability, not necessarily something I would flag specifically for the DCE side of the business. I was going to add to Andrew's comments as well, Kevin, that we've made a comment earlier that we view the order of magnitude of the Go forward, non insurance line of business is being around $1,000,000,000 and that's of revenue. And obviously, that's going to be dependent on Final attribution of lives under the program. So the number will differ from that, but we just wanted to give a general order of magnitude for how large the scale of the business would be.
From Whit Mayo from SVB Securities.
Thanks. I think We've covered most of everything. But back on DCE, did any of the physicians give an indication to you that they didn't want to renew or participate In the program in 2023 or was this exclusively a Clover driven decision?
As I said in my comments, the fact is, we actually had a lot of applications. So we could have grown the program quite significantly Like this year, we actually chose to make an adjustment so that it could be more strategic and we could actually broaden that portfolio into other statutory So I'm not going to say that sounds like every single position, but by and large, it was our decision because we could have grown it quite significantly.
Got it. So if you're standing up some type of MSSP offering in 'twenty What does this look like? Is this a software driven business? Maybe any help Would be helpful for us.
Yes, absolutely. So, all of it will be underwritten and driven by Clover Systems. I think the way that we should look at it is that the pathway into value based care is probably not straight from fee for service into upside, downside, Which is what if your reach is, but we provide we plan to provide a more gradual pathway where people can go enter Have a lot of folks, like I said, we have a lot of applicants and they could move into an upside only program like MSSP, move through the various stages of MSSP And then when appropriate graduate into something like the ACO Reach program. We think that's closer to what CMS envisions anyway, And it's unusual that we only have a reach up and out and so having multiple sort of tiers that they can participate in with all this data From Clover Assistant informing us which tier they should be in, we think can provide a very strong advantage in terms of selecting the right program for a doctor.
Got it. And I don't know if you gave any disclosure around any retro activity in the DCE segment in the quarter. Just asking that question.
Do you mean like prior period development impacting the financial performance?
Well, given the underlying benchmark Keeps changing and some of the assumptions that CMS is providing to the industry.
Yes. So certainly, we're impacted By that, there was not a significant impact from any kind of prior period throughout relating to that in the quarter. Okay.
Thanks.
And it
appears we have no further questions at this time. I will now turn the program back Over to Andrew Choi for any additional or closing remarks.
Thank you. And thank you all for joining us today. I'm looking very much looking forward to 2023, when I will share our next quarter results with you all as CEO of I'm very proud that Clover is strong, purposely evolving and we're definitely heading in the right direction. I wouldn't be here today without Vivek, His vision, inspiration and belief that healthcare can truly be both different and better than what it currently is are all Core to Clover's philosophy and integral to why I began this particular journey. In the last few years, there are many things that Clover has executed on Under Vivek's leadership and vision that were far from common wisdom and were deemed to be impossible.
But we are not seeing these things come to fruition. When Clover started, we were the only plant really offering incredibly strong plant benefits on a PPO and we see now that other plants are Copying our model. Years ago, we launched our own complex care program, betting that the future of chronic care management was in the home. We now have a Clover home care practice powered by Clover Assistant that has grown tremendously. We believe it's actually one of the largest in New Jersey And we see others moving to that model of care.
And of course, we have always believed that primary care is critical And that farming physicians with technology to simply help them make better decisions without forcing them to do anything they don't want to do is crucial. Clover Assistant was born from that insight and we've yet to see anyone who could compete with us on that There's one last piece of VDAC's vision yet to address and that is that the future of healthcare can only be realized
This does conclude today's Clover Health Third Quarter 2022 Earnings Call and Webcast. You may disconnect your line at this time. Have a wonderful