Tim Carney of the Washington Examiner has news for anyone who thought the Affordable Care Act represented Barack Obama’s effort to help the little guy fight those big, mean insurance companies.
Remember when President Obama and the Democrats sold Obamacare as a way to stick it to the insurers and painted Obamacare opponents as shills for the HMOs?
They weren’t telling the truth.
WellPoint owns many of the Blue Cross companies and other insurers. Check out this research note on WellPoint from stock market analyst site Seeking Alpha. The note is titled “Someone is Loving Obamacare, Among Them WellPoint Shareholders.”
Highlights:
While the fundamental financial picture presented above seemed to be going just fine for WellPoint before Obamacare went into effect in 2014, the “special sauce” that has made the stock soar further could in fact be Obamacare. …
With all these great developments for the company, what could possibly go wrong? Well, for one thing, something could happen to Obamacare.
This isn’t that surprising if you’ve been paying close attention. After all, Obamacare forces people to buy insurance, forces many employers to buy insurance for workers, subsidizes peoples purchase of insurance and provides bailouts for insurers who lose money.
The insurance companies played both sides during the passage of the bill — publicly supporting most of the bill while quietly funding the guys who were trying to kill the law. But since the law passed, the industry has basically defended Obamacare. Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts filed a brief with the Supreme Court siding with the administration in 2012.
But it was crucial for Obama and team to pretend they were battling the insurers, because people don’t like health insurance companies.
