James F. Flaherty
Analyst · Jack Meehan with Barclays
This strategically becomes quite fascinating and while you may be new to our calls, I would just emphasize that our whole strategic direction in terms of the counterparties we want to be interacting with, they absolutely have to have the following 3 criteria: And the first and most important is quality outcomes. The second is critical mass. And that you should interpret that to be market share and local market share. That's why I talk about these cluster markets and density metrics. And then the third criteria is efficient operations, which is another way of margin, i.e., you've got to make money. So we aggressively seek out counterparties that have those 3 criteria, and we aggressively move counterparties that don't have even 1 of those 3 criteria out of our portfolio and off to the side. In a separate conversation, we can bring you up to speed as to who came in and who came out over the last 3 or 4 years. Now, however, we're moving into what I call kind of market-driven health care reform. And this is where footprints like HCR, like Brookdale, particularly with their ancillary revenue platform, like Emeritus, like Genesis, even to a certain extent, like Sunrise, although they're obviously lower acuity. That's where you're going to create some real value here, particularly as you drill into where you've got overlapping concentrations in specific markets. So we, to answer your question, we haven't made some introductions. We are not operators. But we have put a number of the folks in our portfolio together, discussions are ongoing, and I think they tend to be -- they tend to quickly move towards specific markets where there's overlaps, as opposed to entity-wide or enterprise-wide sorts of situations. I will also tell you that the other 2 types of organizations that are involved in those discussions are acute care hospitals, as well as payors, the HMO. So again, I'm -- personally, I'm fascinated to watch all this play out. But when you have a platform like HCR, who has 90% of its admissions coming from hospital discharges, those hospitals, you may have seen an article yesterday, there's an article that came out that talked about the punitive penalties that will come to fruition to the detriment of the acute care hospitals if patients are discharged and then they have to be readmitted. And this is where a quality partner like HCR -- and again, I would -- I have very good things to say about Genesis, too. But certainly, HCR, with their quality, their clinical, their commitment to clinical outcomes and their ability to partner with payors and hospitals in risk sharing schemes, that is really going to drive some value. And that is what will make our OpCo investment worth significantly more than what it is today in the coming years. So that's a little bit of kind of -- that's a '14, '15 sort of a view as to what's going to happen here.