Universal Health Services, Inc. (UHS) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Go ahead and get started. Thanks for joining us this afternoon. I'm Whit Mayo. I lead Leerink's efforts covering health care providers and managed care. My pleasure to have Steve Filton, Chief Financial Officer with UHS here today. If anyone has any questions, just raise your hand, we can try to keep it interactive.

But Steve, as you reflect back on 2024, you exceeded the midpoint of your original guidance by $200 million or so, roughly a 10% beat versus your original targets. Maybe where did the sources of outperformance really come from when you look back at the year?

Yes. We talked about this a little bit on our recent earnings call. And I think that it feels to us like both of our business segments have returned to sort of an operating model that is more historically normative than it's been in a number of years, probably dating all the way back to pre-pandemic levels. And that is same-store revenue growth in the mid- to upper single digits, I would say acute care revenue growth, 5%, 6%, 7%, same-store behavioral maybe a little bit higher, 6%, 7%, 8%. And I think that in the current environment, if you're able to grow revenues at that level, which we were able to do in 2024, expenses have definitely stabilized, moderated, wage inflation has moderated from where it was. at the height of the pandemic. Physician expenses on the acute side have stabilized. And so as a consequence, I think what you're seeing with that mid-single-digit growth -- mid-single-digit revenue growth is stabilization of -- and the ability to grow EBITDA and expand margins. And I think you certainly saw that in 2024. Obviously, we're also helped in some cases by some Medicaid supplemental payments or DPP payment increases in '24. That's certainly a part of the upside in 2024 as well.

What are the actual underpinning assumptions that you have within the guidance for both segments on same-store volumes and revenue?

Yes. So what we talked about is a -- again, in terms of the underlying business, something that I think is pretty historically normative. So I mean, I'm going to go back to acute care revenue growth in the 5%, 6%, 7% range. I'll use 6% as the midpoint. I would say that's split pretty evenly between price and volume in our assumptions. So 2.5% adjusted 2.5%, 3% adjusted admission growth, 2.5%, 3% pricing growth on behavioral, I use 7% at the midpoint and say that's skewed a little bit more to price, probably 4.5% price and 2.5%, 3% volume. Obviously, and I think we talked about this on the call, we've really done little to sort of forecast those kind of exogenous variables that are out of our control, Medicaid reimbursement, exchange subsidies, tariffs, site neutrality. There's a bunch of potential impacts in the health care or hospital space that because we don't have any real clarity on, we've tried not to. I think we have suggested that I think we tried to make our overall -- or our underlying guidance a bit more conservative so that we could absorb some amount of headwinds from some of these other issues. But obviously, it depends on the order of magnitude we could see.

Yes. If I could see all of the different service lines within the behavioral segment, you've got acute psych, you've got residential, you've got the addiction business, U.K., you still have a U.K. business and then you have military services as well. How would you characterize the outperformance and underperformance or headwinds and tailwinds there?

So I think it's fair to say, and we certainly have talked about this for some time. I think we believe, and I think most of our peers suggest that, and I think the broader macro metrics suggest that underlying demand for behavioral services remains quite strong. And I think that crosses all diagnoses. You ticked off some, whether it's general psych or eating disorders or autism or illnesses of the elderly, like to mention, Alzheimer's, that sort of thing. I think we find it to be pretty strong throughout. I think we see outpatient growing. We talked about this a little bit on our recent earnings call, trying to expand more in the freestanding outpatient business. But just generally, I don't know that any I'll call them, diagnoses sort of categories or service line categories are growing faster than others. I think most are quite strong. The challenges for us are being able to hire all the people we need to service the patients, dealing with insurance companies and the limits that they're trying to place on sites of service and patient day restrictions, that sort of thing. But just broadly, I would describe the demand dynamic across, again, the whole sort of portfolio of diagnoses as relatively strong.

This past year, we've had the widened investigation around the residential treatment industry. Paris Hilton has been very visible around advancing that. How are you internally dealing with that? Is this anything that your team focuses a lot on? I mean -- to me, it seems like it's a broader focus on industry oversight than any individual company or specific issue for you or some of your peers. But how do you internally talk about this as an issue?

So I think the challenge is that a lot of the attention, whether it's media attention and articles in the media or regulatory attention. In this case, you talked about the Senate Finance Committee hearings back in June, I believe. I don't know that there's a great deal the industry can do to proactively kind of defer or avoid that sort of coverage. I mean, I think -- look, you point out, I think honestly, the Senate Finance Committee hearings were largely driven by Paris Hilton. And I think if that was somebody who had a different name, I'm not sure that we would have had Senate hearings, but it was sort of kind of a newsworthy thing. I think the flaw in a lot of these articles and coverage and even the regulatory oversight is kind of focus on individual incidents. We treat in our behavioral segment in excess of 600,000 patients a year. And while obviously, it was our goal that in doing so, there's never a negative incident, there's never harm that comes to a patient. Realistically, it would be difficult to treat that level and that magnitude of patients without having the occasional negative outcome as much as we try and avoid it. We have provided, again, to the Senate to news sources that are writing articles, more of that broad data that suggests the vast majority of patients that we treat have positive outcomes, have a very positive patient experience. We see meaningful improvements in our patient experience scores year-over-year. But they tend to avoid, I think, that sort of reporting for kind of what's the more sensational thing. Although interestingly, at the end of the day, even though the Senate Finance Committee held hearings and pointed to a number of companies that had very specific issues, et cetera, the ultimate sort of suggestions or recommendations they had were sort of more community-based, more family-based care. And the reality is there have been a lot of issues with family-based care, foster care, community care, et cetera. And then their other suggestion was just sort of more transparency, meaning more reporting from the industry on incidents, et cetera. So people who are seeking care have that data available to them, and we welcome that. We're happy to have greater transparency and sort of more comparisons between providers because we ultimately think we will be advantaged by that. We think that the care we render is as good as anybody else in the industry.

I get asked a lot around the frequency of some of the legal cases and the investigations and does it feel like this is -- is this a pattern that's growing here and where do we go with them? Do you agree that there's a heightened level of sort of investigative stuff happening right now and legal issues for the industry?

So I think those are 2 separate issues. You already asked about one. I'm not sure that the oversight and regulatory issues are directly related to the litigation issues. I think sometimes they can be somewhat related. But at the end of the day, we've talked about the fact we increased our malpractice reserve and our malpractice expense this year. We did so based on the third-party estimates we get, which we have always based our reserves on a third-party actuarial analysis. We did so again this year. And we've actually conservatively moved our actuary gives us a range of sort of outcomes, a range of reserves that they're recommending. We have historically sort of targeted the midpoint of that range. This year, we moved to the upper end to some degree, I think to kind of respond to sort of the trends that we're seeing in that business. But interestingly, and I think we've made this point, and I think you heard it, the increase in our reserves and the increase in our expense based on the actuarial feedback is split pretty evenly between acute and behavioral, even though, to your point, more of the sort of headline news in the last year has been on the behavioral side of the business. And I think that's because the actuary tends to take a kind of a longer-term view based on our specific experience, broader trends in the industry. And I think, quite frankly, the malpractice trends are not even part of a broader malpractice trend, which I think is on the upswing. But I think part of a broader sort of litigation trend broadly in the sense of all kinds of tort cases, product liability, other sort of third-party liability cases have all been on the uptick. And I think we're responding to that. But again, I think that goes beyond our industry. The way that we -- and you sort of talked about it before when you asked how we respond to sort of the media kinds of attention, I mean, we are very focused on what we describe as a zero-harm policy. No patient who comes to us, who's within our control should ever be harmed while they're in our care. And I think we have a pretty strong track record of doing that so. Now again, if we're going to see hundreds and hundreds of thousands of patients a year, there will be some exceptions. We try and make sure that those exceptions are as absolutely minimal as possible, but that is always going to be our focus.

You invested in EMR 2 years ago? Last year, 2 years ago?

18 months maybe.

Where are we in the rollout? How much capital have you spent? How much do you need to spend? How long is this going to take? And any tangible benefits that you've seen? And I'm particularly interested on like recruiting, if that's been any anecdotal positive for you?

Yes. So I think it's worth noting that I think the behavioral industry broadly is fairly candidly behind the curve, particularly when compared to the acute care industry. in terms of information technology, et cetera. And I think there's a couple of reasons for that. I mean the acute care industry is much, much, much larger than the behavioral industry. The acute care industry, particularly from an EMR or electronic health record perspective, really benefited. People may not remember, but at the beginning of the Obama term, there was a stimulus bill and part of the stimulus bill was $20 billion, I believe, was the number to encourage acute care hospitals to install electronic medical records. So in other words, the federal government for us picked up, I'm going to say, somewhere like 75%, 80% of the tab for us of implementing an electronic medical record in the acute care space. There's no similar support or subsidy for the behavioral hospitals. It will probably cost us, I'm going to say, somewhere in the $60 million, $70 million, $80 million range to fully implement all of our behavioral hospitals on an EMR. I think we're about probably 20% of the way through that. The pace, I think, picks up, the more experience we get, the more implementations we do. So I think we're probably 2 and 3 years out from being fully implemented. The other sort of technology that we've talked about and mentioned, I think, on our recent call as well is sort of what we describe as patient rounding technology. So patients in a behavioral hospital are different than patients in an acute care hospital. Most patients in an acute care hospital are in their rooms and in their beds for most of the day. If they get up, they take a few steps and they're back in their bed. I mean, but they're not moving around. They're easy to keep track of. Behavioral patients or patients in a behavioral hospital really shouldn't be in their rooms at all during the day other than to sleep. And so keeping track of them and keeping in mind that they're generally physically healthy, et cetera, is a real sort of focus of the behavioral business and behavioral care. And so historically, we've done that in a very manual way, eyes on patients, somebody laying eyes on the patient literally every 15 minutes that they're in the hospital. But that technology is improving using sort of what I'll call Apple Watch technology, wearable device technology where the patients can wear that. That allows us to keep track of them and knowing where they are. It also allows us to keep track of when a staff member lays eyes on them or is close enough to lay eyes on them, et cetera. So we can get much more efficient in that. And that, I think, really increases patient safety and increases our efficiency. So along with the electronic medical record -- now you talked about sort of recruiting, et cetera. And I think the issue there is, I think this is very much a generational thing. I think folks who graduate from nursing school or from medical school today, younger people, they're expecting electronic medical record as that's sort of their standard. And so if you want to recruit from that subset of the target employee population, I think you need to be technologically competitive. And that's part of -- another part of the reason why we're investing in both electronic medical record technology and this patient rounding technology.

When I look -- I'm sorry, I'm bouncing around. I sent you my questions and you could probably tell beforehand like what's bouncing around a lot here. But when I look at the corporate overhead cost, it's not you don't have a corporate overhead line. I mean we just subtract the numbers and that's what's implied. That is now up to about $500 million. I don't believe you have the health plan in that. I think it's in the acute segment. But is there anything else inside that, that is contributing to that level of growth that we've seen? You used to have a construction business. I don't think there's much activity there anymore. But I'm just trying to square my head around like a $500 million implied number.

Yes. So the answer is we don't have that construction management business anymore. So that's not contributing to it. And you are correct that the insurance subsidiary is recorded in our acute care results. No, I think the only thing that has really risen probably sort of beyond the rate of inflation in recent years, we do include the bulk of our sort of equity compensation in that. And that number, I guess, fortunately, has increased with the relatively dramatic increase in our stock price over the last several years. That's really the only thing. Other than that, the main thing that's in there is our corporate overhead expense, which is mostly salaries, quite frankly. Obviously, that has increased with the size of the business, but I don't think it has increased faster than the size of the business. And I don't think we would expect that it would.

On the health plan since I've said it, just maybe remind the room the size of that business, how you look at the strategic value of that. I don't think you'll look to sell it, but maybe just talk a little bit more about how you look at that as an asset.

So I think as is true with most provider-based insurance plans, we don't view our insurance plan as sort of a stand-alone profit contributor. We've talked a number of times that it largely runs at something close to a breakeven, maybe a small profit or small loss. But the main rationale for the business is to create more physician alignment, create physician alignment in a way that we actually think is less expensive than sometimes employing physicians or other arrangements where physicians are being paid or subsidized. The nice thing about having physicians as part of a network or a Medicare Advantage plan or Medicare Advantage savings, is there sort of a shared incentive for you to treat patients and to treat them efficiently, et cetera. And so that physician alignment, using the physician alignment as a way to create a narrow network for more effective steerage of patients, all those things are really the reasons why we and I think any other provider operates a provider-based plan. To your point, if there was another way of accomplishing that by, for instance, having some -- either an insurance company -- a stand-alone insurance company owning that business or partnering with us, as long as we could meet our goals of keeping the physician alignment in place, keeping the network in place, largely sort of along the lines of a narrow network that favors our facilities and our providers, I think we'd be willing to do that. And I've had some conversations over the years in exploring that. The challenge is the stand-alone insurance companies have a different sort of incentive model where they're more interested in the pure profit of it. But if we could find a way to align those incentives, and I think we would be open to that.

You had a good stars here, by the way?

We did. I mean -- and our insurance company increased their star level. It's a little bit of a kind of an ebb and flow. We talked about this year, we've added or projecting adding a significant amount of Medicare Advantage enrollment on a small scale. But generally, when you add Medicare Advantage enrollment, it put some pressure on your star ratings in the short run, although we expect to be able to raise them in the long run. But yes, you are absolutely correct that we have increased our star ratings, which should help us in our 2026 premiums.

Acute margins, costs are obviously -- have rebased materially higher since 2019. Your margins, I think, are still kind of below where you were. But how do you view the trajectory of margins on the business, excluding like directed payment programs and all of those factors that are certainly influencing it higher?

Yes. So we talked at some point in time that our consolidated margins should be able to return to pre-pandemic levels. I think that is still our view. If you look at the 2 segments separately, I think behavioral margins have already done that. I mean, to some degree, that is with the help of DPP payments. But I think what we've said going forward is I still think we believe within the next couple of years, we should be able to return our consolidated margins to pre-pandemic levels. I think if there's an upside to that, it's probably on the behavioral side, more likely to get to above pre-pandemic levels. On the behavioral side, a little bit more challenging on the acute side and the acute side has some structural hurdles. One of the things that has been talked about a lot in the last few years is physician expense, which has probably increased by about 150 basis points and difficult to recover. We also talk on the acute side of a more dramatic shift from inpatient to outpatient care. There's some of that on the behavioral side, but it's clearly, I think, more dramatic, more impactful on the acute side. So yes, I think we have a view that we can -- acute margins still have a runway of improvement, may not get all the way back to pre-pandemic or 2019 margins. But again, I think consolidated margins should get there sometime within the next couple of years.

Just maybe a second on directed payment programs. You've once again materially exceeded your preliminary forecast that you put in your 10-K every year. I know your views around the risk of the program. You've excluded Tennessee and D.C. So maybe just size that amount and maybe when you think you may have some visibility on those 2 programs.

Yes. So as we disclosed in our 10-K, the Tennessee and Washington, D.C. programs, which are new and are awaiting CMS approval or full CMS approval are probably we estimate worth about $160 million in total, the 2 combined if they become fully approved and would be retroactive to July 1 of '24 for the Tennessee program and October 1 of '24 for the District of Columbia program. More broadly, all of these DPP programs have to get reapproved every year. We think about half of the programs have been reapproved for 2025. There's clearly been a sort of a pause in the approval of these programs as the administration transition has been occurring. The feedback that CMS gives the states who I think they routinely communicate with is that they believe that these programs are to meet the requirements. They've been approved before. They will likely be reapproved, although they don't necessarily provide a time estimate of exactly when that's going to be in terms of when the new political appointees are in place, et cetera. The way that we've handled this and you kind of alluded to it is we -- and this is consistent with our historical practice. Once the DPP program has been approved, we assume that it will continue to be approved, and we continue to accrue and recognize that those revenues going forward until at some point, somebody would tell us that there's evidence that they will not be reapproved, et cetera. We certainly are not there at this point. For new programs, we have waited historically until they're fully approved, at which point we would start to include them in our earnings results, which we have not for 2024 and in our forecast, which we have not for 2025.

So you wait for the full approval? Or do you wait for the cash receipt of the program?

Really, it's an approval issue. It's not a cash issue. But it comes up here because people have rightly asked about Tennessee and specifically because HCA -- so HCA has made the point that the Tennessee program has been approved for the last 6 months of 2024 from July to December. And we agree with that. We believe that in order for those monies to be paid, CMS also has to approve what's called the 1115 Medicaid waiver. And we're waiting for that to happen before approving the -- those Tennessee dollars. We believe, and I think our reimbursement folks have confirmed this with their counterparts at HCA. HCA sees it the exact same way factually that the 1115 Medicaid waiver is necessary, they just take the position that they think that's a more routine sort of approval likely to happen. And so they've recorded that in the back half of '24. Again, I think we both agree on the facts. And we've taken, I think, a slightly more conservative position in how we're going to treat that. But yes, I think that the general sense that HCA has, which I hope is absolutely right, is more likely than not, the program gets approved and we'll be able to record that at some point in 2025.

You got a couple of big states that benefited the behavioral business. As we talked to at least one state Medicaid director, one of the things he told me was like as more states are coming around to go through the reapproval process, there's a greater desire to include behavioral health providers. And frankly, there's a larger desert that's out there. There are access points that just aren't and it makes a lot of sense to give providers the money so that the economics work. Do you believe that is an accurate statement that we're seeing more? Or the behavioral health providers are being included at a larger pace right now in these programs?

Yes. No, I think that's true. Look, I think we have a view that from a legislative perspective, there's probably more bipartisan support for behavioral reimbursement and behavioral access to care and other, again, macro issues than even on the acute side. And as I said, I think it tends to be a relatively bipartisan support. But I think that's specifically true of the DPP program so that a number of states that have had existing programs have revised their programs to include either behavioral coverage where behavioral coverage didn't exist or more generous behavioral coverage. And there still are some states. North Carolina is an example that I can think of that implemented a program but still doesn't cover freestanding behavioral facilities. So I think there is still more upside. But yes, I think your general sort of observation and general statement that more and more states are covering behavioral care, both in DPP payments and in other ways, I think, is a fair statement.

You've opened a new acute care hospital in Las Vegas, and Vegas does not nearly get as much attention as it used to, Steve, when I think about the earnings calls. But how is that new hospital kind of changed any of the dynamics within that market as that volume is being redistributed? And how has it relative to maybe the internal expectations?

Yes. So I think your first comment or your comment about Vegas not getting as much attention as it used to is probably fair. Vegas, I think as anyone who follows the company sort of closely knows, is our single biggest market. And as a consequence, it had always been a focus. I just think there's so many other issues that people are focused on now. They tend not to focus on those geographic issues. But yes, so we opened West Henderson Hospital, which is our sixth acute care hospital in the market back in early December. So it's been open for a few months. It's gotten off to a quick start. We expected that. The West Henderson, which is kind of the Southeast quadrant of Las Vegas has been growing very quickly. We opened Henderson Hospital, east of West Henderson, as you might imagine, like 5 years ago, and it got off to probably the quickest start of any hospital we've ever opened. I think West Henderson will do even better than that. We continue to be the largest market share provider in Las Vegas with a market share in the sort of mid-40%. So we will continue to expand, not necessarily with brand-new hospitals, but with capacity and access points. We've got, I think, 10 freestanding emergency departments now in Las Vegas and other access points. And we'll continue to do that as we like that market. We like its growth trajectory. There's just a lot to like it, and there's a lot to like about our market position in that market. But yes, it's opened strongly. I think it will continue to do well. It may -- and we mentioned this on the call, I think it may distort a little bit negatively some of our same-store data, particularly admissions data or adjusted admissions data in '24 because some of that business is being cannibalized from our existing hospitals. But I think most of the business is new and incremental. So it should be a very successful as pretty much every opening we've had in Las Vegas in the last 20 years has been.

And then you've got start-up costs, obviously, that you're incurring as that's ramping, but you view that as offset by, what was the...?

Yes. So most of the start-up costs, quite frankly, were already incurred in '24. We opened, as I said, in December. There is a ramp-up. I mean no hospital opens at sort of the average margins in the market. But what we have always found in Las Vegas is our hospitals in Las Vegas ramp up faster than any other market that we operate in.

You mentioned micro hospitals. I just had me thinking you have a network strategy in each of your markets, you're thinking about developing ambulatory capabilities. Maybe just share some of the areas where you are actively deploying capital and advancing an ambitious outpatient strategy.

Yes. So I mentioned freestanding emergency departments, and we've had great success with that strategy. I'm going to say 5 years ago, we didn't have a single freestanding emergency department in the country. And today, we probably have in excess of 30 and probably another 10 under development that will open sometime in the next 12 to 24 months. And that's kind of a whole access point strategy. The nice part about freestanding EDs is that you can open them in many places around the market that don't have to be in geographic proximation to your existing facilities, and it's a way to draw business that you might not otherwise get. So that's been a big focus of ours. But I think broadly expanding the continuum beyond more traditional inpatient has been a focus of both of our businesses. We want to have more of an outpatient presence on the acute side. I think that means things like ambulatory surgery centers and freestanding imaging centers and physician practices, all of which I think we've got an expanded presence in over the last several years. We talked a little bit on our recent earnings call about more of a presence on the outpatient continuum on the behavioral side, especially, again, the freestanding part of it because historically, we've always had an outpatient practice in behavioral based on patients who are discharged from our inpatient facilities require outpatient care as many of them do. That's kind of a natural for us. We control that flow of patients. But patients sort of going the other way, entering the system on a freestanding basis, they're not usually as interested in getting their care on the campus of a behavioral hospital necessarily. They sometimes view that as a more acutely ill population, maybe they don't feel like they belong there, et cetera. And so I think there's an opportunity to capture more freestanding outpatient business over the next several years on the behavioral side.

Maybe just capital deployment in general, like larger scale capital deployment, thinking kind of 3 to 5 years. There's nothing that's out there for sale that I'm aware of. You've got very low leverage today. You could buy back a bunch of stock. You could raise your dividend maybe to a level that could be of interest to a different set of investors. What are all the -- I know you go through a process every year sort of thinking about like taking the dividend up or do we buy back more stock? Or where do you guys land internally on that?

So I think in -- on the issue of capital deployment, past is likely to be sort of prologue for UHS. If you look at our capital deployment over the last 5 years, even 10 years, it has been heavily skewed towards CapEx, organic expansion, either building new capacity as we were discussing at West Henderson or capacity -- additional capacity to our existing facilities, new ER capacity, new OR capacity, that sort of thing, new beds on the behavioral side of the business. We've also been, I think, as you suggested, a relatively active acquirer of our own shares. And again, I think that's likely to continue. So the area where we have not been terribly active is in M&A. And I think part of the challenge is there are independently owned, a lot of private equity-owned businesses out there, particularly in the behavioral space. I think the challenge from an expectation perspective is we find that those private equity owners generally have a view that those businesses are worth 12, 13, 14x EBITDA. That's a challenge for us economically when our own stock is trading at 7 or 8x. But we'll look at those. We'll continue to look at those businesses and see if any of them makes sense. But I think, again, most likely, we're going to continue CapEx at right around the same level that we're currently at. Maybe that level goes down a little bit in the next few years as we open up some of these bigger, particularly acute care projects. We'll continue to be an active acquirer of shares. I think one of the questions that came up a lot on the most recent call was would we consider accelerating our share repurchases, levering up to some degree to do that. I will note that our leverage levels are at -- if not at historic lows, they're at pretty low levels. And I don't think we have generally operated at these low levels for an extended period of time. So I think if no other opportunities come up, the likelihood that we would sort of accelerate and become a more active acquirer on shares is probably a likely outcome.

On the ACA subsidies, you're one of the only CFOs that's come out quantifying the exposure, and I can't remember the number, but something in the $50 million-ish range, something like that, maybe near the midpoint. Can you maybe elaborate more on the process that you went to and how you identified this person has an ACA plan. We think they're going to find employer-sponsored coverage or be uninsured. Just what was the level of rigor that you went through in that analysis?

Yes. So look, I think it's worth noting at the outset that I think we purposely sort of threw out this number or floated this number because it felt to us like people were overestimating the impact of the exchange subsidies expiring or allowed to lapse. The way we went about this, and I think we were very stressed very much that it was a -- I don't want to say back of the envelope, maybe too much of an exaggeration, but it was a relatively broad exercise with not a ton of precision. About 5% of our current acute care adjusted admissions are exchange patients. We assume that about half of them would lose coverage. And we didn't do the sort of nuanced analysis that you're suggesting, which is how many might be able to get Medicaid, how many might be able to just sort of downgrade their plan from gold to silver to bronze. We just assume half would lose coverage. And then we went through the exercise in that population where we can do this to say, all right, how much of those people have brought us elective procedures in the past because we would assume we would lose those without coverage. And how much of those people would still come to the emergency room even though they didn't have coverage, and we'd have to provide care without being reimbursed for it. And that's how we got to our sort of $45 million, $50 million number. Again, I would stress that I think it's a pretty broad guesstimate, but I think we were responding to the fact that I think people were, in some cases, estimating numbers that were multiple times larger than that. I think that was a mistake.

All right. Well, Steve, I have not realized that we have run over time. So with that, thank you so much. We'll stop there.

Thank you.

Thanks, Steve.