The Obama Years

[matapule]

Re: The Obama Years

"Not perfect" could be the understatement of the year, and we're only into the first day!.

But it will help people like SG.

[Frankie's Market]

Re: The Obama Years

But it will help people like SG.

And it would have helped people like her a lot more,.... if the legislation wasn't helping insurance companies so much, as the Huffington Post shows.

Investors are seeing the Senate's version of health care reform as a massive public subsidy for insurance companies -- and as a result, are sending the sector's stock prices shooting up, up, up. Stripped of a government-run insurance plan, the bill would give tens of millions of Americans no option but to start paying hefty premiums to private companies.

The rise in stock prices has been particularly striking in the period since Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) said on October 27 that he would filibuster a Senate health care reform bill if it included a public option - a threat that caused Senate leaders to cave without much of a fight.

Here's a quick breakdown of major health insurance company stock performance from Oct. 27 to Friday's market close:

* Coventry Health Care, Inc. is up 31.6 percent;

* CIGNA Corp. is up 29.1 percent;

* Aetna Inc. is up 27.1 percent;

* WellPoint, Inc. is up 26.6 percent;

* UnitedHealth Group Inc. is up 20.5 percent;

* And Humana Inc. is up 13.6 percent.

By comparsion, the Dow Jones Industrial Average is only up 2.3 percent during that time; the NASDAQ Composite is up a (relatively) paltry 1.4 percent.

This reminds me of the TARP program. Billions of dollars of bailout money were immediately dispatched to the Wall Street firms and big banks who had put our economy on the brink.... But so little aid have gone to distressed homeowners and small businesses.

And so it is with this health care "reform." Instead of containing health costs and improving coverage through competition with govt. providing a public option to the people, govt. is going to pour more money into the private insurance sector and trust them to do "the right thing." What the ??????

I'm with Vanguard on this one, as far as maintaining a skepticism on all this.

And as a final note to all this..... why has the word "charity" gotten into this discussion on health care reform? I thought the whole idea behind extending health care insurance coverage and managing costs was to decrease the number of people ending up in charity wards,..... to decrease the number of lower-to-middle class families (with insurance) who end up losing their home and declaring bankruptcy due to catastrophic medical costs. Telling people to beg for charity after they have exhausted whatever savings and assets they had is not health care reform. It's the same sad state of affairs that middle class America has been in for too many years now, where they are one serious illness away from financial ruin.