Company: EHC
Filing Date: 2025-02-28
Form Type: 10-K
Source: 0000785161-25-000009
Chunk: 123

Company: Encompass Health Corp
Filing Date: 2025-02-28
Form: 10-K
Item: Item 1A
Chunk 123
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 avoidance of unanticipated difficulties, costs or liabilities that could arise from acquisitions or integrations could adversely affect our financial results or condition.

•Our inability to attract and retain nurses, therapists, and other healthcare professionals in a highly competitive environment with often severe staffing shortages and potential union activity could increase staffing costs and adversely affect other financial and operating results.

•Competitive pressures in the healthcare industry, including from large acute-care hospitals that would typically serve as a referral source for us, and our response to those pressures could adversely affect our revenues or other financial results.

•Our inability to provide a consistently high quality of care, including as represented in metrics published by Medicare, could decrease our revenues.

•Our inability to maintain or develop relationships with patient referral sources, including our joint venture hospitals could decrease our revenues.

•Acute-care hospitals that participate in joint ventures with us may experience, and in the past some have experienced, operational or financial challenges that, in turn, affect our joint venture inpatient rehabilitation hospitals.

•A pandemic, epidemic, or other widespread outbreak of an infectious disease or other public health crisis, and governmental responses to those events, could decrease our patient volumes, pricing, and revenues, lead to staffing and supply shortages and associated cost increases, otherwise interrupt operations, or lead to increased litigation risk and, in the case of the COVID-19 pandemic, has already done so in many instances.

•A regional or global socio-political, weather, or other catastrophic event could severely disrupt our business, particularly in areas such as Texas or Florida where we have a concentration of hospitals and other coastal areas susceptible to tropical storms and in western states susceptible to wildfires.

•Regulatory and other efforts to promote a transition to a lower-carbon economy may result in significant operational and financial challenges for us.

Financial Risks

•General conditions in the economy and capital markets, including any disruption, instability, or uncertainty related to armed conflict or an act of terrorism, a governmental impasse over approval of the United States federal budget or an increase to the debt ceiling, rising interest rates, an international trade war, or a sovereign debt crisis could adversely affect our financial results or condition, including access to the capital markets and interest expense on new or existing debt.

•Our debt and the associated restrictive covenants could have negative consequences for our business and limit our ability to execute aspects of our business plan successfully.

•The price of our common stock could adversely affect our willingness and ability to repurchase shares.

•We may be unable or unwilling to continue to declare and pay dividends on