Alignment Healthcare, Inc. Common Stock 2026 Global Healthcare Conference

Thanks for having us, Michael.

No. No. No, everybody, seriously, I think CMS this year is very sensitive about anybody commenting around the Plan Preview 2. I cannot talk about it at all from a regulatory point of view. You have heard me say in the past, I thought we were close. You have heard me say we were not happy about the HEI decisioning, particularly that that decision was after the actual implementation period. But other than that, I just cannot comment it. I think this year is different than prior years, and we do not want to be the one poking the bear.

Nice try, Michael. I love you, but I honestly cannot even go there at all. I would acknowledge, in the past, we have been much more open. This year's different, and I think part of it is just all the scrutiny around Stars itself, all the policy discussions, all the legal discussions. Again, we don't want to be the ones that go there.

Thank you. Just wait a couple of weeks, and we'll roll it all out when it comes out, whenever it's mid-October.

Yeah. No. I think after last quarter's call, the consistent question was, "Look, you guys have been so pristine over the past five years. You have always beaten raise. You have had a lot of consistency. You have set that expectation. What is different?" There seems to be noise now. That was the consistent discussion we got. Let me connect the dots for everybody. The other things we have said include, number one, the proof of concept of getting to 300,000 members, $5 billion, our clinical MLRs producing, has given us a lot of confidence. The proof of concept works. That is number one. Number two is we have also said we are scaling the company. What that really means to investors, you should understand it. It is doing a diagnostic on every part of our company when the company was doing really well.

We did not wait until the you know what hit the fan. We actually started looking at ourselves, making changes at every functional area of the company in order to make ourselves not just a big small company, but we needed to be a small big company. That required a lot of changes, aggressive change management agenda over the past couple of years. We looked at our claim systems. We looked at our medical management capabilities. We looked at our data architecture. We looked hard at AVA. We looked at all of these things, and we started making investments to change all of those, in order to also, point three, get to where we needed to get to, which we said we want to get to at least 1 million members.

As we did that, I looked at our core systems, our workflows, and we needed to make these investments. Anything that I think people are pointing to now is, in my mind, noise resulting from those change management initiatives. Okay? We are largely through a lot of it. Specifically, whenever you go through a claims application implementation, those are messy and noisy. We are pretty much through the end of that, and there is a lot of data points that would suggest that, all in terms of claims throughput, inventory, lag days, adjustments, all that noise is starting to settle down. I think there are other areas that are still yet to be fully complete. I think the last thing I would say that I have said is I really think there is a lot of low-hanging fruit, resulting from the diagnostic.