Good morning, everyone. My name is Joanna Gajuk. I'm an equity research analyst at Bank of America on the healthcare facilities and managed care team. I have lead coverage of some of the home health companies as well as other post-acute care providers. Today, together with Kevin Fischbeck, Andy Bressler, and Patrick Wood, it is my pleasure to welcome you to our home care conference. We have two days packed with company fireside chats, and also we have a couple of very interesting panels today and tomorrow. We hope you enjoy the conference. Today, we're kicking off things here with Amedisys, one of the largest home health and hospice providers in the U.S. Today with us is Paul Kusserow, Chairman and CEO, and also Chris Gerard, President and Chief Operating Officer, is joining us here too. Welcome, gentlemen. Great. Thanks for having us, Joanna. We appreciate it. Sure. Paul was very nice and agreed to go right into Q&A. A note to the audience, please utilize the Q&A section of the WebEx, where you can pose a question, and I'll be more than happy to relay this question to Paul. I guess, Paul, you know, labor has been the single biggest topic that we've been discussing over the last couple of months. I guess we'll start with that topic. Can you talk about, you know, what are the biggest areas of shortages that you're seeing? Also with that, you know, how much of the labor pressure that we're seeing across the industry is really short term versus more very permanent? Sure. I think there are increased labor pressures uniformly across Amedisys. No, we haven't seen it. I think one of the good things, although in pockets, we're definitely seeing it. There are particular markets where it's hard to find, and this is mainly finding nurses. I think one of the advantages to us is this is not a surprise by a long shot. We said as we were doing our strategy work, there's gonna be a couple things that we know are gonna be long-term challenges for the home health industry, and for us. We need to get out in front of them, and we've been getting out in front of them. I'd say we're suffering a lot less than most people out there. As I said, they're in pockets I don't anticipate. Again, if it gets worse, again, I think we'll be better than everybody else. Reason is, again, as about two years ago, we had our strategy work. We're looking at what, you know, we said there's gonna be fundamentally two things, three things that we're really gonna focus on for the next five years. One is labor, two is Medicare Advantage, and three is consistent growth. If you take the labor piece, what did we do? We reduced our turnover to very low rates. We're constantly looking at turnover. When you actually have people who wanna stay with you know, you have to recruit less, you've got more productive people. We've brought our turnover. We just looked at some of that data. It's down about 20% to what it was a year ago. The other thing is, if you look at our yield on recruitment, there's less people out there, which I think speaks to your point, Joanna, but our yield is equal or better than what it was. Because, again, we have 60 people, we have very sophisticated tools that are out there doing this. I think what we've done is, so you have two things. What are you bringing in? How are you stopping the back door? In the middle, what are we doing to drive more productivity with our existing workforce? This is where we're really excited. You know, we've used Medalogix. I think, we're, you know, we own a big chunk of Medalogix, and we're probably the best utilizers of Medalogix. We've been able to drive better outcomes. Our quality scores have gone up from 4.3-4.6, utilizing less visits, because we've been really big been sophisticated users of the Medalogix tool. Utilization has gone down. We've utilized and during COVID, we've learned how to use telemedicine. We also are utilizing our PRN pools. We're spending some time understanding how to do that. We believe there's tremendous opportunity with our PRN pools. We're starting to innovate and look at things like scheduling, which we believe will draw more people, a wider variety of particularly, again, nurses into our company and then allow more flexibility for those nurses. In a lot of cases with nursing, the name of the game is flexibility. We've done a lot of primary research on nurses because that's our business. We know what the needs are of these nurses at various stages of their career, as well as various, you know, demographic times in their lives. We know how to deal with this. It's all about the labor. We have no assets, we're just people. We have to be able to be the best utilizer of people out there. I think we're doing a great job. Frankly, I know it's tough out there, but this is gonna separate the wheat from the chaff. It's not gonna be easy, but I feel very, very good about how we're gonna do versus our competition. Chris, am I missing anything? I don't think you did, other than I do think that there are some things that are temporary in nature in terms of just how the pandemic has created this kinda rush to kinda gig nursing versus, you know, permanent nursing. I don't think that's gonna stick, you know, long term. I think that as that some of that stuff settles out, as you know, the pandemic hopefully starts to settle out as well, then, you know, we should see a little more normalization of kind of how nurses are moving throughout the healthcare ecosystem. Yeah. Thank you. Before I forget, Joanna, at some point, I'm sure we'll get off the labor issue, although in our recent talks, no one seems to wanna do that. The other fourth initiative, which I didn't bring up, is Contessa. At some point, because that makes us a very differentiated company, and that's been going extraordinarily well. Those are our four strategic initiatives. That's where we put our efforts. Yeah. I appreciate it. We actually are gonna talk to Travis tomorrow, so go deep there. Okay. Okay. Good. Great. Thank you for bringing it up. Yes. Actually, I want to stay on labor for just, you know, two minutes or so. You know, you did on the call when you talk about the expectation that you think the labor cost inflation is going to be, you know, a little bit higher than historically next year, you know, maybe growing 4%-5%, right? Can you talk about some of the offsets? I mean, Paul mentioned some of the things you guys are doing around labor, but is there a way to kind of, you know, try to quantify it or maybe provide a sense of magnitude of, you know, how much of these things could really help you offset the cost inflation into next year? Chris? Yeah. In terms of as we build out clinical capacity on the home health side, and we're able to drive down contractor utilization dependence, you know, that's about a $2 million a quarter kinda headwind that we're facing right now at the rate we're running today versus where we think we should be. We'd also talked about for every one percentage point we move the LPN or the PTA utilization is about $400,000 in EBITDA. We do feel like we have additional room there as well. Then on the smart scheduling side, we feel like we're still able to you know kind of continue to utilize Medalogix, drive down utilization a little bit further from where it is right now. You know, one visit's about $26 million in EBITDA. You know, in doing that, you know, we don't feel operating against for one visit, but we think we're providing, you know, up to a visit more than absolutely is necessary for the patient. We're gonna continue to focus on that. On the hospice side, we've been pretty vocal that we are carrying excess capacity today, you know, with the sense that we will grow into it ADC-wise. That's about $12 million in additional capacity that we're carrying today. If the ADC does not materialize, obviously we'll have to take a hard look at that, but that's kind of on the table, too. Yeah. I think we're doing the right thing in hospice, and it was a hard decision. You know, we're carrying about $12 million extra in hospice staffing at this point 'cause of a 700 decline in ADC. We believe once the ADC you know once the length of stay stabilizes a little, that'll get eaten up, and it's a worthwhile thing to do considering the growth trajectories we're looking at. Yeah. In terms of, I guess, the recent trends, on the earnings call, you indicated that going into, you know, exiting the quarter, going into October, things were kinda looking a little bit better in terms of, you know, hiring and employees on quarantine. Can you give us any update on what you saw in November? I guess to a degree right now, we're thinking or monitoring the new variant, so it's probably too early to tell, you know, what the impact could be from there. Just trying to assess essentially, you know, your confidence in your Q4 outlook. Yeah. Chris, I'll punt to Chris on that, then anything you want me to cover, Chris, I'll. Yeah. No, I think, you know, we're almost at the end of the year. We feel very good about what we laid out for Q4. Things are falling in line as we expected. The labor situation is better. Quarantines are down. Contractor utilization is still up, obviously, and we're still seeing a little bit of kind of inconsistency on the length of stay on the hospice side. Our top line volume numbers are in line with our expectations. Our, you know, our cost controls are obviously there as well. I feel like, you know, I feel good as we exit this year, as we go into next year. From an ADC perspective, we're about to lap, you know, kind of the major decline that happened throughout Q4 into January of this year. I'm really excited about the volumes that we have coming in, and, you know, hoping for a stabilization in the length of stay, and then we'll start to see, you know, significant growth on the ADC side throughout 2022. Yeah, feel good about Q4. I mean, a lot of the junk is dissipating, the COVID-19 junk, Joanna. I think you know, again, my job is to watch the big trends with us in our company. I think we've been able, Chris and team have been able to do an extraordinarily good job of controlling what we can control. I think we've controlled very well. I think what we can't control, if the question is, how well do you react? I think our reactions have been very good on some of the things that have come out of the woodwork on COVID. You know, if you look at our vax rates, for example, you know, with the vaccine mandate, which now there was an injunction, so it's on hold. You know, you look at, and this is anecdotal, but you know, we called all our competition and our friendly competitors and said, "How are you doing?" We were just doing extraordinarily well compared to most people about getting people vaccinated, getting exceptions where they were needed and justified. So I think executionally, we feel very strongly that we're really executing at the top of our game. Yes, I guess to this point, to wrap up that topic on the labor front, do you expect, you know, the labor pressures, I guess, to be a bigger headwind to margins or to your ability to grow volumes into next year? I think where there is labor pressure, I'm not concerned about growth in this business long term at all. The concern I have is, can we maintain margin, particularly if we don't change the game with managed care. I think, you know, I think eventually as things settle out, we'll go back. I don't know if we'll ever get back to the 2% contract labor percentage that we had, but I think, you know, I think we feel that's a good, healthy amount. I think we feel very, very good that, you know, and then you look at the top line growth analysis that we've done over the next five to 10 years, these industries are growing really rapidly. You add the quality kicker on top of that that we have. You're looking at very significant growth. Again, the challenge to our company is this thing's growing very fast for the foreseeable future. How are we gonna keep up with it, and how do we maintain margin in that? Growth, I think, is just gonna come, particularly if we crack the managed care code, which we think we are. We're getting there. I guess to that end about organic growth in different sectors where you operate. Can you know, remind us how you're thinking about those growth rates currently, you know, mid-single digits, or is it, you know, some of the areas growing maybe a little bit higher? Can you remind, you know, how you think about long-term trends for your businesses? Yeah. Long-term. Short-term. Long-term in home health, we think that home health for the next seven-ish years is gonna grow between 5% and 6%. With the quality ratings that we have, we think we'd add another 2%-3% on that from referrals. We think hospice is gonna grow in the 7%-9%. The quality, the translation to stars, which should happen in a couple years, we believe will be at the top of the business again, like we are in home health, and that will add another 2%-3% of growth. Personal care, which as you know, we've stayed away from that except for some very focused areas, and have a very alternative approach towards personal care. That'll see extraordinary growth, but that will also see extraordinary labor pressure. You know, finding $15-an-hour people is difficult. As we talked about previously many times, our hope is with all the CARES Act subsidies that have been out there that are now coming due with the no-pay waiver, with sequestration, the penalty there coming back in, we're anticipating that there will be some. You know, unfortunately, I've been wrong, so we've been anticipating this. I've been saying this for the past two years, but we anticipate really that this spring we'll see some significant shakeout and consolidation, which I think will be beneficial to all the big players. Yeah, I think it is a very helpful summary of the different pieces. I guess in terms of the next year, right on the call, you indicated you expect EBITDA to grow year-over-year next year. Can you quantify some of the main drivers and how should we think about organic growth, you know, next year? I guess, are you including any coronavirus-related or the pandemic-related costs in when you think about your adjusted EBITDA for, you know, when you plan to guide for next year? Yeah, I mean, we're clearly working through that now, but Chris, you wanna go through some of the details and maybe Nick hop in? I'll start and maybe let Nick fill in some of the blanks here. You know, when you think from a top-line perspective next year, obviously sequestration going away, got a more favorable rate on the home health side than initially anticipated. You know, we think we'll be about net positive, about $10 million, you know, when you flesh out, you know, sequestration and the rate impact for us for the year. What we also have is about, I think, $12 million-$15 million in COVID-related costs, particularly around testing and PPE, that we expect to, you know, incur that will be included for next year. Significant, you know, we got top-line growth in terms of volume and revenue for both home health and hospice on top of the sequestration of the net rate that we have. But also, you know, labor again is gonna be the biggest headwind, looking at maybe 4%-5% wage inflation there in terms of year-over-year, which is kinda probably. We're also factoring in raises again next year in Q3 as we have done every year for the last several years. You know, a lot of puts and takes. Nick, you had a list we went through the other day that's kinda more detailed, if you wanna kinda put that out. Sure. Yeah. I mean, you touched on all the main points, Chris. I think the one other consideration as we enter 2022 is the incremental impact of Contessa, you know, under a full year of ownership, which we've said publicly it'll be about, you know, another $10 million-ish impact. And we'll let Paul get into this, but I would say a lot of that is highly dependent upon a number of, you know, interesting opportunities that have come up, and we'll say accelerated opportunities within their JV pipeline. You know, I think when we announced the deal and then guided to what 2022 would look like from both a revenue and EBITDA perspective, I would say that the progress there has been better than what we assumed. Now, you know, better from a top line perspective with the acceleration of some JV partnerships which could impact EBITDA. You know, we'll put all those pieces together and come out with kind of what 2022 will look like from a Contessa perspective, once we do give guidance. Yeah. Again, me personally, and I'm sure Chris and Nick feel the same way, I take that Contessa hit all day long considering what we're seeing in the market with Contessa, and considering what we think the potential of Contessa is, and particularly what we think Contessa will do in terms of differentiating us from our competitors as a more diversified, more fully capable home health and hospice business, particularly in risk taking. Yeah, because this is a nice segue actually, as like I mentioned, we're gonna talk to Travis Messina at Contessa tomorrow. But I guess, yeah, at the high level, I was thinking to ask you, Paul, to kind of just talk about, you know, expectations for when, you know, you might expect Contessa to actually turn profitable, right? And also, you know, what are the target margins for that kind of business? And I guess with that, maybe you can also frame for us in terms of the timeline for when a typical JV, I guess, ramps up into profitability. Give us a sense, you know, how these different JVs are ramping up over time. Yeah. I think you have to throw out the traditional sort of JV heavy, hospital-oriented people that are out there. That model doesn't play here. I'd say the reason why we did Contessa is, I think, from a very big strategic view, we wanted to prove that people who normally would go into institutions can be taken care of in the home. People who normally would go into hospitals, 150 DRGs that can go into a hospital, can go into the home. People normally that would go into SNFs can go into the home. People that want palliative care and find ways to take risk in palliative care can have that risk taken. I think, you know, you look at the model of Contessa, it's a brilliant model because they can take care of people at full risk. Full risk, they can take care of people. They can go to the hospitals. Because their MLR is relatively low comparatively to what it would cost the hospital. I used to be in the hospital business for seven years, and I know these DRGs are generally unprofitable. What they do is they go in and they basically say, "We'll pay you for these DRGs. We'll guarantee the payment, we'll guarantee the profit levels." The other thing is they also go to the plans and say, "We'll give you a discount of what you're paying for that DRG anyway." One, the plans make money. Two, the hospitals make money. Obviously, Contessa makes money. You look at the patient side of things. Given a choice, at least this is in our that we've seen, 90%, over 90% of the patients will pick hospital at home or some sort of home care. The other thing is, if you look at the satisfaction rates are north of 90, The other thing is, readmissions rates are 40% better than if they stayed in the institution. Obviously the plans love that because they're cutting that. The other thing is the hospitals benefit even further, because we buy services from them at generally full rates. The really interesting thing about this, because the MLR is, it's very efficient care. The other thing is we're taking full risk on this. You know, we will be at risk for that amount. We do all the actuarial work, the underwriting work, the claims work, and then we also do the reinsurance work, so it's covered for us. This puts us in a completely different league. Particularly with the plans, I mean, we talk about our TAM doubling. The fact is we're able to play in this world. Now, what we're also doing here is we're learning how to drive, you know, to take in different situations more risk, which is where we think the world is going, particularly as Medicare Advantage grows, to engage and start to guarantee numbers in risk because we have the infrastructure that can do that, which no one else has. No one else is taking claims. No one else is reinsuring. No one else has underwriting capabilities, nor do they have actuarial capabilities to do this. In five years of Humana, I know that's what you need and you need it really good or it's not, or you can't take risks. The other thing I'd say that I really love about Contessa, it's an integrated platform. Because we're taking care of sicker people, often they require a variety of different services. We're building and have built out a platform that allows for each individual to have those various services come in at various times and to coordinate that care through a platform. I think it puts us ahead of the game in terms of being able to take individualized care of sicker people. Lastly, I'll then talk about the pipeline. The pipeline, you know, Chris and, you know, Scott Ginn basically, you know, said, "Why don't you go, you know, stay out of our business. Why don't you go take over the Contessa stuff?" I've been out on the road with Contessa. The pipeline's better than I ever thought it would be. Because people really wanna talk about this, and the value proposition to all the constituencies is so strong, it's very good. I think you'll see remarkably good things moving forward. We gotta close some of these deals, but the pipeline's much stronger than when we initially looked at the company. No, definitely a very exciting platform and an exciting times for this organization in particular. I guess you mentioned, you know, taking higher acuity and SNF. I guess to that, how big could the SNF at home opportunity be for Contessa? I guess, you know, to the degree you have any updates on Choose Home legislation. You know, would you expect this to being passed anytime soon? Yeah. I think it could be an extraordinary opportunity on the SNF side. Chris helped us think this through. You know, he said there's jump ball business, and we learned that that's the case between when somebody can't decide SNF or home. COVID drove more into the home. But then there's the acuity levels, and we had already done a deal with Sound Physicians, and we're starting pilots to do more SNF at home to move up the acuity chain. Initially, we thought 7%. Remember, the SNF TAM is twice home health in terms of revenue. You know, we think it's someplace between the 7% and the 20%, maybe even up to 30% we could pull out of SNFs. I think there's tremendous opportunities there, to do that. Then in the hospitals, when you look at the 150 DRGs, and you look at their balance sheets, and you look at how they're and you pull these DRGs out, you increase bed capacity, all these other things. The economic impact of the hospitals is quite considerable if you do this at scale. I think the whole constituencies there are very, very interested and excited about it. That's why we're getting so many calls. Plans also. Also, the plans like it. We have all the plans, the big plans, signed up. You know, we just announced a deal with Highmark, who wants to participate in more in-home care. Obviously, they get better economics. It's that whole world of working with the payers to really drive that. As you know, the payer, all the money's with the payers now and all the data's there. Nick, anything? You're the expert. Anything I missed? No, I think you covered it all appropriately. Yeah. I guess, Paul, you mentioned before, you know, the star ratings and quality metrics. Amedisys definitely screens pretty good on those, which is great. I guess specifically, I wanna ask the Home Health Value-Based Purchasing program, right, that was now expanded nationwide. Clearly you know, seems like Amedisys is very well-positioned to benefit from that. I just wanna confirm, when you were talking about the 2%-3%, you were kinda talking about both volumes or also incremental volumes because of the high quality? Or were you also talking about you know, benefits to pricing, right? 'Cause there will be some you know, additional bonus payments for those providers that do better. You know, my question is whether this, you know, are you satisfied with the structure, the five, you know, plus minus, maximum bonus payment under the program? Also, do you expect, you know, incremental rates to look better for the company? Well, let me start off like I always do randomly, talking about something I wanna talk about, and then I'll get it to answer you. If there's one thing I'm proud about, and it has very little to do with me. If there's one thing that you know put a bullet in my head and move me along is what we've done with quality. I give Chris Gerard tremendous credit for this. You know, the fact that we're 4.6 stars, that we have over 300 care centers and three of them are below four stars. They'll, believe me, those ones are gonna go up. The fact that we embrace so much quality, all the tangential things that occur with quality in terms of growth, in terms of people who wanna work for you, in terms of people who wanna stay with you. We made modern healthcares, you know, b est places to work. When you create quality, it's a virtuous circle there that has a lot of economics attached to it as well. Because again, in the people business, really good people wanna work for a really good place that puts quality first. That's where we've seen that virtuous cycle start to go. I think what Chris has done in putting that bar so high to almost attainable. You know, I never. In my wildest dreams, I never thought we would get up there for a company of our size. I just think some of the tangential benefits that are gonna come out of this are and particularly economically, are gonna be extraordinary. I kinda lost my place a little, but I wanna turn it over to Chris because this is really his baby, and he's the head of the quality committee on our board, and he's the one who really got us here. Yeah. Hey, yeah, Joanna, back to the actual question number one. I mean, I agree with Paul. First is, you know, if we don't lead with quality, none of the other stuff matters. That's kind of the core tenet of our organization. We do feel like the plus and minus 5% is fair and it is a decent structure. We're not as happy with kinda how the bell curve is so tightly wound around zero to where basically, you know, moderate to poor performing agencies are not penalized as much as they should be, as well as I think high performing agencies may not have as much upside as they should be. We've approached CMS in the past about this and about some thoughts and ideas around that. We're gonna continue to do that. But even in today's structure, our expectation is that, you know, knowing our commitment to quality, what we're able to do out there, what moves the needle within this, with this, pay for performance, kind of model that's out there, you know, we feel like the 2%-3% should be bonus payments on top of, you know, kind of our net reimbursement. Delayed a year gives us time to really kinda, you know, get our strategy in place and start executing on it now. I'm confident that, you know, we're gonna strive to optimize ourselves and to take advantage of this opportunity to get paid as a high quality provider. To follow up on Chris' point. We went to CMMI, who did the original demo, and we talked to them, and we put in a recommendation to push the curve down and spread it out further, you know, so there's more negative fives and more positive fives. We believe the economic benefits would be better if they press the curve down because it would get rid of some of the poorer players, and the good players would be rewarded and provide more productivity. It's still good savings. But again, what I liked about it is, and why I really want the curve pressed down as much as possible, I'll bet all day on our team to do the best they. To have a five, you know, a zero to five just free money of our top line as a bonus, I would like as much of that as the government's willing to do and as much as. 'Cause I bet on us all day. I mean, look what we've done. We've gone from three stars when we first started this experiment, and we're up at 4.6. If we can do that, I'm very confident what we're gonna do in value-based care. Great. Yeah, definitely, good to have very high star ratings coming into it. I guess the other topic you mentioned before, when we were talking about the outlook, hospice, right? Clearly some higher than expected discharge rate you experienced in third quarter. I guess what are you seeing, you know, even most recent weeks? And also could this be also a result maybe of some changes in referral source mix that you experienced there? Because I guess we, you know, we didn't hear this from other providers. And also with that, you know, when you talk about the most recent trends, you know, what are the leading indicators that you look out in terms of, you know, seeing the discharge rate essentially normalizing? Yeah. Nick, could we address the other provider issue because I think there's some nuances there. Chris, I think has a really good handle on this. Maybe Chris, you start, Nick, you can pop in. Yeah. For us, we've seen consistently over the last several months, I'd say probably since May, you know, and our median length of stay bounced between 23, 24 days, hit 25 days one month. What we did notice is, as the pandemic was really kinda wreaking havoc on the South in August and September, it came down significantly. As soon as that dissipated, we saw quickly it rebounded back into the 26, 27 day range, which was good for us. We saw in the North, it started to come down as the pandemic was starting to have an impact up there. From a segmentation perspective, yes, if we get more hospital referrals, and we do typically get more hospital referrals in the North than we do in the South, that's going to drive a little bit of a lower median length of stay. You know, we're internally, you know, always looking at the data, trying to leverage our sales force to be as diversified as possible out there. We feel like, you know, there still is some inconsistency out there. We also are very, very confident that the actual cycle of somebody from getting a terminal diagnosis to actually seeking end of life care has been greatly disrupted by this pandemic. Late diagnostic testing in the disease process, you know, more infrequent visits to the physicians and the specialists out there to talk about options. There's just a lot of clunkiness in kinda how things were doing prior to the pandemic versus today that, you know, we do feel like that will normalize over time. For us, you know, we have the sales force out there. We have targeted accounts. We've targeted our accounts appropriately. As we see, you know, waves of hospitalizations happen, that's gonna drive down our median length of stay if those referrals are coming out of the hospitals. To balance that, you know, we're always looking to, you know, diversify our referral mix out there to, you know, community and hospitals as well. Great. Anything you wanna add, Nick? Nick? I guess we'll take it as a no. Oh, yeah, on hospice, another big topic, but I guess we don't have that much time to talk about it, but just high level, in terms of the carving of hospice into MA, kinda what are your high level thoughts? You know, if it was to be nationwide, you know, how do you see Amedisys positioned with payers on the hospice side? I think we're very skeptical that this will occur. I think the numbers that have been reported in some of the industry publications are wrong. As you know, I come from the payer world. I don't think there's any enthusiasm for this. If there is a carve-in, I think it creates a very complex and Humana's going through this right now, creating a very complex relationship between its members and making the right choice for end-of-life care. For them to participate in profiting and fundamentally, the other thing is the value of the hospice asset. It's the most efficient way to save money at the end of life and deliver higher quality care at the end of life. I think if managed care decides to come in and try to trim costs out of their dying members, I think they're gonna have a real problem. I think they understand that. I think what they also understand is the strength of managed care, because again, it's, like, good economics, and it's the right thing to do for their patient, or for their members, is get people on hospice at the right time and keep it on the government rolls, and make sure that people are getting extraordinarily good hospice experience. You know, the last 3, 4, 5, 6 months of death are about 24% of all costs for anybody, fee for service or managed care. When you look at that, you know, the key for the smart folks in the business understand, you know, getting a little chunk out of somebody's one of their members' death versus offloading all the costs, offloading all the risk, and providing that experience, a better experience to that member is pretty much a no-brainer. I'd be very surprised, particularly if we decide to oppose it very seriously. I think the negative publicity on the plans would be so significant, I don't think they'd wanna touch it. Right. I guess we are almost running out of time. A couple of very quick questions that we plan to ask every participant of the conference. You know, first, one word. How would you describe the home care of the future in one word? One word. Well, as you know, I talk a lot. Chris talks a lot less, so he can do more one-word things than I can, Chris. I just say it's optimistic. I mean, this is the best I've seen this industry positioned to make an impact in the healthcare ecosystem. You know, I'm entering my thirtieth year of being in this industry. It really means a lot to be able to provide quality care in the home, and we couldn't always say that. I'll just say optimistic. And. I'd say two words: more comprehensive. I think more and more is gonna come into the home, and more and more, and the more people who offer comprehensive solutions at high levels of quality are gonna do extraordinarily well. I guess, do you think that the pandemic changed the perceived value of home care? Absolutely. Absolutely. All right. Chris, you were saying something? I said absolutely. Yes, I think it did, for sure, and it showed the value of what we do. All right. Unequivocally, I think there became out of this, particularly in long-term care institutions, the vulnerability there. I think the other thing is, again, we haven't talked about this, but you've heard about this, Joanna, is when you look at the demographics of the people who will be home health and hospice patients, these are baby boomers, and they have no intention of being in institutions. They have, you know, they're 20% of the population, 55% of the wealth. They will make sure that they're staying in place, in home, where they wanna be, and they have the money to do it. You know, most of it's covered, of course, but they will fight hard for this. Yes. I guess we ran out of time. Let's end here. Thank you, gentlemen, for joining us today. Thanks everyone for listening in, and I hope you stay on for today's conference and see you guys around. Thanks so much, Joanna. We really appreciate it. It's always a pleasure. Yes. Thank you, Joanna. Bye.