Stanley Bergman
Analyst · UBS.
Yes, Steve, of course I just said no one has a crystal ball. There are lower number of visits to the physician offices at this point. Quite a bit of that, of course, is driven by the H1N1 change. There was more concern last year versus the concern this year. It is very hard to determine how much exactly of the traffic is related to H1N1. There will be lots of articles written in that area and there's a lot of debate. It's quite clear what our sales, additional sales were of the products related to H1N1, which we've given our estimates in the call. We're not down on the medical market. There is that sentiment out there that we think that there could be few ups and downs. Longer term, medium term shall we say, healthcare reform will drive further visits into the office particularly at the primary care level. Although it is expected that reimbursement per procedure is likely to go down. So the use of products is likely to remain stable, taking out H1N1, more or less stable and go up a little bit. Having said that, there will be no doubt lower reimbursement per procedure. Lower reimbursement per procedure will mean that the practitioners will be seeking more value for the dollars they spend on products, and that's our job to make sure that we provide the best value in products to our customers. This could, in fact, dampen internal growth, but it's highly unlikely that it will dampen profits. In fact, we think the opposite. This, together with the increase in demand for electronic medical records, which will also be driven by the need to make the practice more efficient, but at the same time, it will be driven by the government subsidies. All of this should help our business in the long run. So we will be called upon to help practitioners operate a better business, more efficient business so that they can provide more quality care to more patients, higher quality care to more patients. All of this, we think, will present good opportunity for our Medical business. And I think one has to be very cautious when one reads all the articles about traffic, as there are many dimensions to the medical practice, and certainly, the impact of any change in patterns on our business needs to be very carefully thought through. In fact, we're quite optimistic about our Medical business.