If I were writing the Centene story, I’d assume the operating model is changing and spend my time figuring out what they’re replacing it with.
Look at everything together: ACA pressure, Medicaid changes, state-plan exits and losses, Stars, leadership churn, VSPs, ISPs, whole functions disappearing, bigger roles for the people who remain, and a lot of money going to outside partners. That’s not just a headcount story. They’re deciding what they still want to own, what gets centralized, what gets automated, and what gets handed off to somebody else.
The questions for Centene:
For every dollar Centene expects to remove from employee expense through Enterprise Optimization, how much new spending is being committed to consultants, technology vendors, managed services and offshore providers?
And this one.
For every capability Centene removes internally, who owns that capability afterward?
Centene has always sold the idea that it has national scale but still understands the states and communities it operates in. You can simplify a lot of that. You can also simplify yourself right out of the knowledge and accountability that made the model work.
So to me, the story isn’t that Centene is changing. Obviously it is. The story is what it’s becoming, what it still knows how to do itself when this is over, and whether all of this is actually cheaper once you count what gets paid to everyone outside the company. And if that’s the case, what are we the taxpayers doing with our tax money vs. how we might be able to reorg the broken system.
For the reporters… specifically, what are you thinking of writing about?