Wayne Deveydt
Analyst · John Rex from JPMorgan
John, let me walk you through the pieces. We had about $150 million of what I'll call non-cash charges that we covered in the quarter, and I'll walk through each one of these in a little bit of detail. One is, as we look at health care reform, and how we saw it evolving over the next, say, 5-plus years, we did a deep dive of all of our assets in the organization, that would include internally-developed software, core systems, locations, et cetera, and made a decision around our longer-term strategy on those assets that we thought we could take an impairment charge today. And so we took a $95 million non-cash impairment charge in the quarter. In addition, we took a $30-plus million pension charge. Now while our pension plans are fully funded on a cash basis, this was an accounting non-cash charge, specifically while our plans are frozen, what we are finding is that more individuals are electing to take a full payout upon retirement versus deferring that payout over the life of their retirement. We think that's primarily the reflection of what we're seeing the economy. When that occurs, you're forced to accelerate the accounting component of that charge regardless of the funded status. Now we think that, that trend could continue into 2011. We're not assuming the economy will improve and for that reason, we're assuming people will continue to elect to take lump-sum payments. And so while the non-cash charge in the quarter of $30 million, I would not necessarily assume that, that would not repeat. There's a higher probability it would repeat next year and so we've made that assumption as well. And then we had about $25 million, just under $25 million of lease write-offs as well that we accelerated as we consolidated our location. That's about, again, when you add those up, about $150 million that we covered in the quarter. And then on top of that, we made some investments in some other items. For example, we made some additional investments in our marketing and advertising and our start investments around Senior. With Private Fee-for-Service going away, we saw a unique opportunity to really accelerate those investments this year, not only for enrollment in 2011, but for the start program to set ourselves up very well for the 2012. We started making those investments and already qualified, we believe, under the under the new start calculations for enhanced payments, but we think we can even accelerate that more and made those investments. We also had some severance in the quarter and enhanced incentive comp as well. So when you add all that up, we believe we had a very strong quarter covering those components.