Magellan Health Services, Inc. 2009 Financial Guidance Call Transcript

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2008-12-17 08:25:28.0

Tags: Financial, Barclays Plc., Call Transcript, Magellan Health Services Inc., Operational Accounting, Investment, Finance, Seeking Alpha

Question-and-Answer Session

Operator

(Operator Instructions) Your first question comes from the line of Josh Raskin – Barclays Capital

Josh Raskin – Barclays Capital

Maybe you could expand a little bit on what you were saying around the commercial utilization that you were seeing a slight uptick but you don’t think its economically related and maybe what sort of magnitude are we talking about there?

Rene Lerer

First I think if you remember in the third quarter we talked about a specific account that had somewhat increased utilization. It was an account that we had that had a significant influx of members. As membership changes amongst health plans there are certain plans that just generally have a higher utilization pattern then others.

Some of its driven by plan designs, some of its driven by geography and as the mix of business switches amongst those you tend to see higher utilization. So when you adjusted out for that I think we said the mix was worth about 1% or 2%. We’re still seeing utilization trends adjusting for that mix if you take that out, of 5% to 7%.

Josh Raskin – Barclays Capital

So it doesn’t sound like there’s any change in the fundamental trend or anything like that.

Rene Lerer

We don’t see that, again it’s the mix that shows a little bit higher total cost because of those cases having just greater percentage of the business.

Josh Raskin – Barclays Capital

On the process of giving guidance here, I guess two things that changed. One not giving the segments any more specifically and then second it sounds like you’ve actually included some potential contract wins in radiology and I think those are obviously both different then what we heard last year. What changed in your mind, what necessitated those changes?

Rene Lerer

We have as you remember in the past, have recorded new business revenue in our guidance. When we did this a year ago, we did have new business revenue for radiology. We then subsequently during the course of 2008 identified that it was unlikely that that revenue would materialize and we removed it.

So its actually quite common for us historically to include unsold business, blue sky revenue, whatever you want to call it, based on our pipeline and based on our adjusted probabilities. So this isn’t atypical for us.

Jonathan Rubin

On the segment guidance question, as I mentioned in my prepared remarks, as we’ve evaluated this given the nature and the diversity of our businesses and the period-to-period volatility of the individual segments, we really feel like its best for us to focus on the key drivers of the overall business results and not get caught up in the discussion and sort of maintenance over time of the segment specific guidance in which case we’d have to react often through the year relative to volatility.

 

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