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.
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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:
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.
Obama in 2009 said from the Rose Garden that Obamacare opponents “would maintain a system that works for the insurance and the drug companies.”
It seems instead, Obamacare is “a system that works for the insurance” companies.
P.S. Related, from CNBC in March: “Obamacare Insurers Push to All-Time High.”
