Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
[Operator’s instructions] We’ll pause for just a moment to compile the Q&A roster.
Sir you have a question from the line of Darren Lehrich.
Darren Lehrich – Deutsche Bank Securities
Thanks. Good morning everyone. Few things here I guess, challenges, wanted to ask you about the M&A environment, we have asked you this before but it looks like you were relatively quiet and from the buyback front, so just want to gauge, where you are, where you see the M&A opportunities now versus say, 3 to 6 months ago and whether there’s reason to believe you will deploy more capital in 2008 to grow with Acute care acquisitions?
Unidentified Company Representative
We have capital, as you can see and we are just being careful and opportunistic. We made a couple of good acquisitions, in the psyche field and we are looking and waiting and talking to people but we don’t really have anything on the horizon at this moment.
There’s been a lot of un-score turmoil at what is happening in the industry and we expect that opportunities will present themselves there.
Darren Lehrich – Deutsche Bank Securities
Okay and Steve just as it relates to the uninsured trend, obviously the charity care number was up significantly. Can you help us understand, what the actual self-paid volume growth was on the acute side and can you just talk about that trend if it was concentrated in any particular regions?
Steve G. Filton – Senior Vice President, Chief Financial Officer and Secretary and Controller
Sure Darren, as you know we had pretty favorable uninsured experience in the first quarter, we saw it spike up in the second quarter and we saw those trends continue again in the third quarter. In terms of where we saw it, I think it was largely throughout the portfolio as it has been these last few years but we certainly did see specific pressures in some of the markets that others have noted, in Florida , in California and Las Vegas. Markets I think that have been particularly hard hit by the housing and the real estate crises. We seem to be feeling that perhaps a little bit more pressure. But for the most part we just continued to see the uninsured trends and pressures that we saw in the second quarter continue on to the third.
Darren Lehrich – Deutsche Bank Securities
And just the overall economic condition in your market as you look into 2008, how should we think about that debt and the uninsured and how are you guys thinking about it at this point?
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