Umair Haque / Bubblegeneration

Tuesday, December 15, 2009

Why Does Wall St Love Healthcare Reform?

Because the current bill has no healthcare reform in it. There are no changes to either market structure, industry structure, reporting, or incentive structures.

In fact, it's a de facto bailout of health insurers. Welcome back our old friends rescission, premium inflation, and price discrimination - all flavours of moral hazard. Say goodbye to, well, better health care.

Why does Wall St love healthcare reform? As the chart shows, money's poured into health insurers over the past few days - hot money from hedge funds in search of, by the microsecond, fake, value-destructive alpha. Why? Because a massive transfer of wealth from society to pharma/hmo shareholders is written into the so-called reform bill.

One so large, I'd wager it's going to be, along with a broken financial sector, one of the final nails in the coffin of American economic competitiveness.

But hey - I'd expect nothing less from our retardedly broken Senate. Thanks, old white dudes who run the world.

-- umair // 11:16 PM // 1 comments

Comments:

Don't leave the White House out of the blame here. Obama has been an incredible friend of big business, especially Wall Street. He's risked minimal political capital on healthcare and the result shows.

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Anonymous // 11:39 PM