Donald Johnson

The End of Exclusive: How Apple Plans to Grow Market Share

AT&T needs to deal with its iPhone debacle. It needs to run TV and print ads that explain its bandwidth problems. And it needs to start charging for the use of services that clog its networks.

Read the comments that follow stories in the NYT and Denver Post about AT&T's iPhone problems, and you'll see that people are furious and frustrated, and they don't understand how they are the problem as much as AT&T and iPhone are.

AT&T needs to give up its exclusive contract with Apple, allow customers to shift to other carriers so that it can reduce the burden on its networks and change its business model.

The company's big problem is that it is a utility in Apple's world, and its culture is incapable of dealing with rapidly changing technology and markets.

Study Shows Commodities Speculators Aren't Causing Price Spikes

Anybody who knows anything about futures and cash markets and doesn't have skin in the game knows long-only index fund speculators and institutional speculators distort the futures markets.

Look at the April 2008 testimony before the CFTC by corn and cotton producers and merchants, which I blogged on here and on my blog last summer.

Anyone who thinks there is no speculation in the cash markets is fooling himself.

Why the 'Group of Six Senators' Is Opposed to a Public Health Plan

If the CEOs of the five or six largest insurers told AHIP to propose real reforms of state and federal health insurance regs, they could kill the public option in a matter of days and reform health insurance markets without costing the Feds a fraction of the $2 to $4 trillion ObamaCare probably will cost over the next 10 years.

Why the 'Group of Six Senators' Is Opposed to a Public Health Plan

I wish the senators cared as much about insurers' shareholders as implied. I doubt it.

Heck, I wish the insurers were more concerned about their shareholders. If they did, they'd be waging a smarter campaign to reform fed and state health insurance regs.

Those regs have so distorted the health insurance markets that no insurer looks honest.

Problem is that the insurers' lobbyists helped draft the screwy state and federal regs. So it's hard to feel sorry for them.

Insurers are their own worst enemies. I don't think they really want to be in the insurance business.

Why the 'Group of Six Senators' Is Opposed to a Public Health Plan

Intrade's back up to 41% bid.

'Blue-Dogging' Health Care

Who at Zacks wrote this nonsense? It looks like a term paper from a high school junior. It's naive, dishonest and makes Zacks look like a tool of the DNC.

I'm wondering whether Zacks knows this has been published under it's byline? And I'm wondering whether SA knows who wrote it. That its featured on SA's front page is amazing.

One Big Problem with Private Health Insurance

1. Rescission will be taken care of in Obama's health care deform bill, if it passes.

2. Millions of people intentionally lie on insurance applications form, figuring it's ok to lie to big insurers and that they'll never get caught. Look at the percentage of people who lie on resumes. Think they don't lie on insurance applications?

3. Pre-existing conditions also are likely to be eliminated as excuses to not insure people if health care deform is enacted. Unless everyone is required to buy insurance, this will allow millions to free ride the insurance market until they get sick. Then they'll pay a month's premium for thousands of dollars worth of coverage, screwing the folks who buy insurance regardless.

4. Mass. just dropped all immigrants to save money. Obama's aides believe health care should be denied the elderly. Barney Frank is pressuring banks to stop foreclosures. You think members of Congress won't pressure a Government HMO, state purchasing co-op and private insurers to take care of their friends? The political class will be ok regardless of how Congress screws health care consumers. Hope you're a member of the political class under ObamaCare.

Health Care Stocks Anticipate Weak Reform Bill, If Any

www.intrade.com shows speculators think there is a 30% chance that health care reform will be enacted before midnight Dec. 31, 2009, down from 46% about three days ago.

Link is here: www.intrade.com/

Health insurers' and hospital companies' stocks are soaring in anticipation of a watered down health deform bill or, even better, no bill.

Link is here:

www.businessword.com/

The consensus that's emerging, in other words, is that Obama's press conference last week hurt the drive to Canadianize health insurance markets in the U.S.

Significant minorities of Dems in the House and Senate are showing the common sense to oppose putting the politicians who created the failed Medicare and Medicaid and VA Health Systems in charge of fixing our health insurance markets. Ted Kennedy's old single-payer plan, which has failed to provide quality and affordable care in every country in which it's been tried, won't work in the U.S. either.

Health Care Stocks Anticipate Weak Reform Bill, If Any

As I've blogged many times, most of the problems with the health insurance markets could be resolved with some changes in state and federal insurance regulations that wouldn't cost taxpayers a dime.

If ObamaCare goes down the drain, maybe the hard left members of Congress who've been blocking real reforms because they wanted to force Americans into a Government HMO (Fannie Med) will start listening to Sen. Jim DeMint and others who have better ideas than Teddy Kennedy and Henry Waxman.

Larry Summers and the Harvard Endowment: Did He Tank It, Or Did He Not?

Is the VF story about a bad bet on interest rates, or is it about Summers' mismanagement? Lots of people make bad bets on interest rates.

1. He bent to political pressure at Harvard just as he's bending to political pressure in the WH. As a result, he let the lefties drive away Meyer and the money making traders. And he's letting Obama drive the country into bankruptcy. He would be a very political Fed chair, and the markets would have no confidence in him.

2. When he became president of Harvard, he left his brain at the door, just as he did when he went back to the WH.

3. Smart people do incredibly dumb things. Summers is incredibly smart and does really dumb things, often because he does the same dumb thing over and over---he thinks he knows it all.

BusinessWeek Explains Why BusinessWeek Is for Sale: It's a Money Pit

BW was a good mag until two or three years ago when it fell off the cliff. Today, there is no there there and it's definitely pushing a left wing, NY centric agenda. So, for me, it's lost its credibility.

It won't make money until the economy recovers. So a perma bull like Larry Kudlow probably should buy it.

Natural Gas ETF: Nowhere to Go but Up, Yet It Keeps Going Down

What does the huge natural gas overhang mean for the pipeline companies like WMB, KMP, etc.? They move and store the gas for a fee, regardless of price for the most part? And they have long-term transportation contracts?

I"m assuming a long recession, which means demand for NG will be depressed for years barring global cooling.

Obama Takes Pressure Off Health Insurers

Politoco.com reports Obama has rolled back his chief of staff's comments on the public option.

Do these guys talk?

Obama Takes Pressure Off Health Insurers

Health insurers and health ETFs popped this morning on the news.

Daily charts are here:

stockcharts.com/script...

Hospital Stocks Down on Rumored Medicare Cuts

Search my blog for "uninsured"

www.businessword.com/i.../

www.businessword.com/i.../

www.businessword.com/i.../

I think Census undercounts illegal immigrants and under counts uninsured illegals and their uninsured dependents, many of whom are American-born citizens. My last link offers a link to Census reports.

Hope this helps.