...about who would profit from the proposed elimination of a public option from the healthcare "reform" proposal rumored to be coming from the Senate Finance Committee, yesterday the major insurance company stocks "
soared":
Shares of U.S. health insurers rose broadly on Tuesday on hopes a health reform bill would not include a government-run option, which has drawn strong opposition from insurers who fear it would destroy the private marketplace.
The S&P Managed Health Care index of large U.S. health insurers closed 6.5 percent higher.
Aetna rose 12.6 percent, Coventry was up 12.7 percent and Cigna was 7.7 percent higher, all on the New York Stock Exchange. Centene rose 7.9 percent.
As Teddy Partridge points out
over at FDL:
Health insurance executives who have poured money into the campaign coffers of Blue Dogs, Max Baucus, Chuck Grassley, Kent Conrad, Joe Lieberman and Susan Collins (as well as their political action committees) likely made all their money back in the one day rise in stock prices. The companies themselves, which hold huge amounts of their own stock, surely recouped all of their PAC investments on Tuesday alone.
As complicated as this all is, you can always count on one easy-to-comprehend principle:
if it's good for the insurance companies, it sucks for us.
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