Health-care start-up Clover Health reports its third-quarter earnings with the surge in Covid-19 delta cases hanging over its results. Clover Health is a Medicare Advantage insurer, focused on using data-driven primary care to bring down medical costs. Clover Health boasted a 153 percent jump in revenue in 2021’s third quarter but could convert that growth into positive income.
- Revenue: Clover reported $427.2 million in revenue this quarter, which is up 153 percent from the $169.1 million reported in 2020’s third quarter. Revenue was almost evenly anchored by Medicare Advantage and direct contracting funds. Clover forecast medical costs will normalize at 94% to 97% for the full year, but the delta surge in the third quarter could make for a miss on that measure.
- MCR: The insurer’s Medicare Advantage medical care ratio also saw a significant change this quarter, jumping about 16 percentage points to 102.5 percent. This quarter’s figure dropped from the 111 percent medical care ratio reported in the second quarter. By 2022, Clover will be offering Medicare Advantage plans in twice as many counties as this year. Its larger rivals are expanding as well.
- Enrollment: Clover’s enrollment grew 125 percent year-over-year to 129,100. That figure is split relatively evenly between Medicare Advantage and direct contracting enrollment. While 2020’s third-quarter reported $12.8 million in income, this year, Clover lost $34.5 million.
- Offerings: In an effort to continue that growth, Clover announced it would continue to expand its Medicare Advantage offerings by adding 5,000 physicians and specialists to its Georgia network. The company says part of that outsize impact is due to the makeup of their membership; more than half come from underserved communities, compared with an industry average of 30%.
- Influences: “We’re more regional than like [UnitedHealth] or Humana, so you’re more subject to regional influences. And that I think is compounded by something like COVID,” explained Andrew Toy, Clover’s chief technology officer, when I interviewed him at the HLTH conference in Boston last month. “I think that makes it harder for investors in the shorter term to get a feel for certain statistics around the company.”