Losers and 5 winners from health care “reform”–and why we’ll be fighting over who pays for a decade

We know what the health care reform legislation due today for a vote in the Senate Finance Committee will cost: $829 billion over ten years.

We know that it will extend coverage to 94% of all Americans, up from 83% now.

And, thanks to the blessings of the Congressional Budget Office we even know that it will pass that committee. And, startlingly for those of us who winced through the August town hall meetings that roasted members of Congress, we even know that something like the committee bill, or stronger, is going to pass Congress.

What you and I as investors now want to know is what stocks are going to make money from health care reform legislation. I think the best way to answer that question is to apply the economics of “externalities” that I explained in my October 6 post http://jubakpicks.com/2009/10/06/capitalism-could-still-get-a-stem-to-stern-overhaul-to-keep-score-in-the-revolution-track-something-economists-call-externalities/

Hope you didn’t think I’d spent all those words building a tool that I wasn’t going to use for stock picking.

The answers are surprising. Read more