Good morning. My name is Mike, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Community Health Systems 2015 Fourth Quarter and Year-End Conference Call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speakers' remarks, there will be a question-and-answer session. Thank you. I will now turn the call over to Mr. Michael Culotta, Vice President, Investor Relations. You may begin your conference.

Thank you, Mike. Good morning and welcome to Community Health Systems' fourth quarter conference call. Before we begin the call, I would like to read the following disclosure statement. This conference call may contain certain forward-looking statements, including all statements that do not relate solely to historical or current facts. These forward-looking statements are subject to a number of known and unknown risks which are described in headings such as Risk Factors in our Annual Report on Form 10-K and other reports filed with or furnished to the Securities and Exchange Commission. As a consequence, actual results may differ significantly from those expressed in any forward-looking statements in today's discussion. We do not intend to update any of these forward-looking statements. Yesterday afternoon, we issued a press release with our financial statements and definitions and calculations of adjusted EBITDA and adjusted EPS. For those of you listening to the live broadcast of this conference call, a supplemental slide presentation has been posted to our website. We will be referring to those slides during this earnings call. As you know, our results consolidate the results of Community Health Systems and the former HMA facilities from and after January 27, 2014, the date of acquisition. The same-store volume and financial results reflect the HMA's performance from January 1 for both 2014 and 2015, as well as for CHS. Further, our same-store for this fourth quarter also includes the following acquisitions: Natchez Regional Medical Center that was completed on October 1, 2014, in Natchez, Mississippi; and Upstate Carolina Medical Center that was completed on November 1, 2014, in Gaffney, South Carolina. This acquisition is in the same-store for only two months. All calculations we will be discussing exclude discontinued operations, loss from early extinguishment of debt, impairment of long-lived assets, acquisition and integration…

And your first question is from A.J. Rice from UBS.

Thanks. Hi, everybody. Maybe just first to drill down a little bit on the cash flow comments, this year you had thought that you would see this big pickup in the fourth quarter. And I think a lot of the shortfall, the $454 million you talked about, was largely a fourth quarter shortfall. And it's hard to delineate the things you're highlighting there in the AR, the timing on payables, as to whether that's also part of the HMA ongoing issues or whether that's more broadly at the company. Can you give us some flavor for that and some flavor for how you think you'll lay out the cash flow as you look at 2016? Would it be back-end loaded to the fourth quarter again or is it more evenly spread? Maybe I'll stop with that. Wayne T. Smith - Chairman & Chief Executive Officer: Yeah. First, we do have a little bit of extra interest in the first quarter and third quarter, so that affects the cash flow. I think you'll still have a little bit of back loaded ending the way we do some our measurement and performance of our AR days. We should see some progress in the second quarter, we won't have the interest payment. Clearly, we had a growth in receivables notwithstanding the change in estimates. We had a growth in some of our supplemental programs. I think we're going to get $45 million this quarter from one of our states and another good size from other state in this quarter which will help a little bit the first quarter. But I think where we fell short was primarily in the receivables and the supplemental programs. We did have a little bit more higher payables than we got. At the end of the year, which…

Okay. And then maybe just for the follow-up, to think about the guidance for 2016 and this is more of a big picture question than in any specific line item, clearly as we got to the back half of 2015, there was quite a bit of variance from the original guidance. Is there anything different about the way you have approached guidance this year? I know your range is much narrower. It's only about $100 million versus $300 million last year. Anything otherwise we can point to that says, hey, we're taking a little bit more conservative approach for 2016 versus 2015? And specifically, I might ask about the first quarter outlook since trying to get back on track with expectations aligning with what you guys feel comfortable you can do. Is there anything you can say about the first quarter outlook specifically? Wayne T. Smith - Chairman & Chief Executive Officer: Yeah. Clearly, we were in 2014, I think that 7-7-7 (39:11) and we went out to $3 billion, $3.2 billion, we had a drop in HITECH there a little bit than we expected and we got another drop in HITECH, actually a bit less this year. I think we finished out, excluding the bad debt adjustment of $2.8 billion, $3.9 billion if you use the run rate that we've said going forward of $20 million, use that – some benchmark maybe what – that could be the 2015 effect. They're somewhere in the low $2.80 billion range, $2.82 billion roughly. So, we've gone out with $2.9 billion to $3.050 billion which we think is a lot more realistic. We've finished out the year somewhere around $700 million. We called out the malpractice adjustment which we think – we thought we'd get it this year; we should get that…

Okay. Thanks a lot.

Your next question is from Brian Tanquilut from Jefferies.

Hey, good morning, guys. Wayne, you mentioned something in your prepared remarks about Florida being 50% of the weakness in volumes. Do you mind giving us some more color on that issue and also how you think that will correct itself over the course of the year as it relates to Larry's comments about volume improvement? Wayne T. Smith - Chairman & Chief Executive Officer: Yeah. I think we said this on the last call when we talk about Florida before in terms of physician recruiting. I think we recruited about three times more physicians in Florida than we have for our legacy facilities. We had a lot of cleanup work to do in Florida to start with. It took us a while to work through the issues there. As we said, incrementally and from the third quarter to fourth quarter, we're beginning to see progress in Florida. Florida is a good state. Population-wise, it's great. It's growing. Other companies are doing well. We will do well in Florida. It's just taken us a little while to get there, but we're beginning to see progress and we have gotten everything in place now in terms of number of doctors. So we feel pretty comfortable that we'll make even more progress going forward.

Okay. And then as a follow-up, capital deployment. In your prepared remarks you talked about paying down debt. So how should we think about balancing debt pay-down versus share buybacks? And also given the outlook you have for divestitures of hospitals, is that an area of opportunity where we could also see more hospitals get sold to fund either debt pay-down -- Wayne T. Smith - Chairman & Chief Executive Officer: Let me talk about divestitures in terms of – and then Larry can talk about our debt – our opportunities in terms of debt pay-down and going out a little bit. We continue – as we said, we have – over the last two years, we've divested about 10 facilities, terminated leases in about 10 facilities. We continue to look for rationalizations and what we're doing now is focusing on our strategies in our big larger markets to make sure that the hospitals fit. Our priority obviously is to get the spin done. That takes out 38 hospitals. And then for us to continue to look at performance of the hospitals that are not performing the way that we'd like them to perform or do not fit in terms of our portfolio going forward. So it's an ongoing process, and I think there is good opportunity for us and a good opportunity for us to monetize a number of facilities that will help us pay down some debt. W. Larry Cash - CFO, Director & President-Financial Services: Yeah. I think, Brian, what we're looking to at the end of the year, when you think about a little extra generating cash flow, first of all, let me mention that we are in good shape on our covenants. Our interest rate calculation and our secured debt calculation, we got plenty of cushion there and we don't have any future maturities. So while the leverage is still higher than we expected to finish out at the end of the year as the EBITDA dropped, we're also doing very few acquisitions. We've got one that will close here this quarter, maybe one either this quarter, next quarter, real small one in the $20 million range. So we're selling (44:43) a lot of acquisition activity going on. And as we generate excess cash either through operations, or Larry will use it to pay down debt. We do have the opportunity to buy stock and this is something that's there, but I think our focus right now is to sort of generate cash and continue to operate the company and think about what's the best thing to do.

Got it. All right. Thanks, guys.

Your next question is from Matthew Borsch from Goldman Sachs.

Hi. This is (45:09) on for Matthew Borsch. With regards to the $169 million increase in provision for bad debt and just your total allowance in general, can you give us a rough sense of how that would break out, percentage wise, between the contemplated and Quorum spin-off assets versus the hospitals that would remain? W. Larry Cash - CFO, Director & President-Financial Services: We've done the consolidated audit there, and we don't think it's going to have a significant effect on the Quorum facilities. We think it'll be close to EBITDA, what we thought, but we are after – and the audit actually got done on February 12, late in the afternoon, that's why we went out when we did since we wanted the market to know about this change. They will begin to do more detailed work on the separation of that which – have that audit done, it'll come out in the Form-10. We don't think it's going to have a significant effect on the Quorum assets, but we'll review that with our auditors who all they opined on on Friday of last week was the total allowance adjustment.

Okay. Great. And just quick follow-up. Can you share a little more detail on that change in estimate for the medical malpractice as well? W. Larry Cash - CFO, Director & President-Financial Services: Yeah. We, as you can see that our factory (46:18) was ahead of a year ago. And we talked a lot about our serious safety events being down 65% to 70%, and that's a great contributor to our less claims cost. And we had that situation last year. We'd anticipated our actuarial to be about $25 million lower in the quarter. Based on some discussions we had with him, he got a little bit more conservative than what we thought he was. And so, that information came available in the first part of this calendar year. And so we ended up having to book another – have a $25 million expense higher than we thought. We'll get that back next year, we're pretty sure, based on the reviews we've done and some comments... Wayne T. Smith - Chairman & Chief Executive Officer: And our trends are definitely improving. W. Larry Cash - CFO, Director & President-Financial Services: And if you looked at the first three quarters, we're in good shape on that, but we were up over a year ago and a little bit higher than we had estimated.

Okay. Thanks very much.

Your next question is from Frank Morgan from RBC Capital Markets.

Good morning. With regard to the decline in the collections on co-pays and deductibles and the increase in bankruptcies, were there any particular geographic areas, or was it within either one of the particular portfolios either legacy community or HMA? W. Larry Cash - CFO, Director & President-Financial Services: There wasn't. We didn't separate the adjustment between the two, but this would be a little bit more of a legacy adjustment probably than HMA. The HMA did go through a pretty good size adjustment when we bought them at the beginning of 2014. I would say that probably on the self-pay component, clearly Texas is growing a little bit more there and probably Texas would be a little bit higher than other states. There's not many HMA hospitals in Texas. So Texas was a little bit more of a challenge.

Got you. And any additional color on the incremental $20 million run rate of the higher levels of bad debts going forward? Is that just based on current experience or did you literally make any kind of change in your underlying assumptions? Thanks. W. Larry Cash - CFO, Director & President-Financial Services: The way we've done that – and again, we bought a lot of hospitals over the years, both large hospitals, Triad and HMA, and also individual hospitals, and you often have to go make an estimate of what you think the collectability of receivables are. And in this case, I think we're up 160 basis points more reserve we're going to have to take going forward. And we took that percent times what the expected growth in self-pay is, which is probably $800 million to $1 billion of gross dollars, and that could drive something like a $16 million to $20 million change in estimate. Similar to what we've done on all the acquisitions we've done. Understand it seems like a small number, but the way you do this, you sort of take about -- what were we reserving at, what are reserving now, that change is what you got to apply to your growth in self-pay dollars, and I think that's where the $20 million. Historically, we had the same situation with Triad. We had $166 million, and if you go back and look at bad debts and charity and everything between us and Triad in December of 2007 and it came right back down the very next quarter. And so, I would expect the same thing to happen here as it relates to this change.

Okay. And I guess just one final as it relates to the $169 million. Is that all related to – are there any prior year periods in there or is that purely just 2015? Thanks. W. Larry Cash - CFO, Director & President-Financial Services: Yeah. Clearly, I think we've said here you're starting looking at the receivables on the books at September 30, 2014. You're looking what happens the next 12 months, so your base is the receivables on the books at 2014, and the way our change in estimate looks, if you go through it and you look at that, it's a hindsight analysis, and then you determine that in this case the write-offs were greater and the cash collections are less than anticipated, so you make a change in estimate. That change in estimate is all run through the current period even though the analysis is based off of historical information, in this case receivables from 2014 and prior. And then you try to factor that in, how much that would apply to – but your booking it all in 2015 and we said here going forward it's about a $20 million estimate and that may be a decent way to think about what effect it has on 2015 also.

Thank you.

Your next question is from Chris Rigg from Susquehanna Financial.

Good morning. I just wanted to come back to the cash flow items that you spiked out at about $340 million. I guess it sounds like some of the supplemental monies are going to come in, but on sort of the pure AR side where you fell short, are you expecting some catch-up payments in the first quarter or are most of those just written off and viewed as uncollectible? W. Larry Cash - CFO, Director & President-Financial Services: We do expect to continue to improve. I think our adjusted AR days are somewhere in the 60s, and we should be somewhere in the 50s. I don't think we'll get there in the very first quarter, but I think by the end of the year, I would expect our AR days to be lower than they are today. We did make a change to sort of segregate our supplemental dollars similar to the way other people have done from state agencies. But I do expect our AR days to improve going forward.

Okay. And then just with regard to, again, cash flow but more forward-looking, obviously you cited the investments and other assets on a legacy basis. Can you give us what's that number should be approximately in 2016? And then is there anything, not unusual but that's worth highlighting with regard to other uses of cash that might not be apparent just looking at the CapEx number? Thanks. W. Larry Cash - CFO, Director & President-Financial Services: I don't think there's anything unusual there as it relates to the CapEx activity. From an overall perspective, I think that we've got $1.5 billion to $1.7 billion. That's in the range of 55% or so of our EBITDA which if we go back we generally run that perspective.

I'll follow up offline. Thanks anyway. W. Larry Cash - CFO, Director & President-Financial Services: Okay.

Your next question is from Andrew Schenker from Morgan Stanley.

Hi. This is Vikram (52:40) on for Andy. Can you give us some color around the physician productivity trends for the hiring you made at HMA this year and then what might be impeding the ramp of productivity and what do you think will drive the increases next year? Wayne T. Smith - Chairman & Chief Executive Officer: Yeah. I think we had to replace so many physicians, so a lot of it is new startup. And as we've said earlier, takes 18 months to 24 months to do that, to get them in place. What we have done over the last year is we've consolidated all our practice management. And so we have one group here corporately that now is a pretty large group that does all the practice management. So we standardized a lot of processes and procedures within those practices, trying to standardize scheduling and follow-ups, all the other kinds of things that we did not have standardized before. So we feel pretty good about where we are and how those will work kind of going forward. It's working in some of our other markets, but this is a – Florida turns out it's a startup for a fairly large number of physicians. So it's taking a little while to get them on line.

Thanks. And then can you give us some more detail on how HMA margins have moved throughout the year and what kind of improvement you're targeting by the end of 2016? W. Larry Cash - CFO, Director & President-Financial Services: Yeah. The margins were better in the first half of the year and the company performance a little bit better. They come down a little bit. We expect next year between synergies and margins to achieve an extra $50 million of EBITDA probably evenly split between margins and activity. We clearly had targeted to get HMA back up to about a 15% margin, which we're going to have to work hard to get that done, probably either latter part of this year or next year. As Wayne said earlier, we think they're pretty good assets and I think we got a pretty chance of continuing to improve those, especially with the improvement, the capital we spend and some of the other projects that we talked about around orthopedics and ER activity. And I do think we'll have some success as it relates to the cash flow of HMA.

Thanks.

And we have time for one more caller. The last question is from Whit Mayo from Robert Baird. Whit Mayo - Robert W. Baird & Co., Inc. (Broker): Hey, thanks for sliding me in. Wayne, just besides recruiting which HMA did do but what operational changes have you made in Florida? Are you still running Florida out of Nashville? Have you moved the divisional support to the local? I guess I'm just trying to figure out like what you need to do to fix some of the medical staff issues and then if you could just comment on hospital CEO/CNO turnover. Wayne T. Smith - Chairman & Chief Executive Officer: Yeah. We have changed division presidents. In Florida, we've added two new people in addition to the division president. We run everything. I mean, we don't run. I mean, this division presidents work. We have CEOs in all the markets. We have in a number of markets in Florida where they've got larger markets, we'll have a market manager there. So, it's very similar to the stuff that we've been doing for a long, long time except for the fact that we probably didn't respond quick enough and fast enough. HMA went for a period that they did not recruit any physicians and we've not only had to fill the slots that they didn't recruit; we also had a number of physicians that we had worked through issues with and some of those worked out and some of those didn't work out. So, I think we're on the right track now, and I think our success record has been very strong through the years in terms of doing this, and I think we're doing all the right things. And the biggest thing that we have changed in terms of practice…

And I will now turn the call back over to Mr. Smith for closing comments. Wayne T. Smith - Chairman & Chief Executive Officer: Thank you again for spending time with us this morning. We are very focused on our strategies that we've outlined today. You will see us improve as we have always done historically. We want to specifically thank our management team and staff, hospital chief executive officers, hospital chief financial officers and chief nursing officers and division operators for their continued focus on our operating performance. Once again, if you have a question, you can always reach us at area code 615-465-7000. Thank you very much.

This concludes today's conference call. You may now disconnect.