Donald Johnson

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.

My Year End Buys and Sells

I think buy and hold is a bad strategy, even for a year. A better strategy, I think, is to buy the stocks on the list and hold them until they go down 5% to 7% from your buy point or until you have a better idea and the stock looks like it's topping, as they all do.

Baxter, Biogen Idec & Elan Subjects of Broken Embargoes

Journals and conferences embargo papers in an effort to maximize their ability to win publicity for their organizations when the papers are released in the journals and at the meetings. They force researchers to agree to their embargoes as part of their terms when they accept the papers for publication or presentation.

Since the researchers' careers depend on their publishing records in peer review journals, they play the game. Also, researchers' grants often require that they publish in peer reviewed journals and that they make presentations at major conferences.

Thus, the intellectual integrity of medical researchers is compromised both by the organizations that fund their research and by the organizations that publish their findings. This is one reason there is so little trust in medical research, medical journals and the information that comes out of major medical conferences. It is so compromised by money and ambition, and it reflects badly on academia and the medial research community.

That analysts broke the embargoes is only natural. They had access to inside information that they couldn't publish, and that causes disclosure problems for the analysts and the drug companies involved with the SEC and shareholders.

Researchers should refuse to embargo their findings. Academia should find other ways of measuring and rewarding scholarly work, and securities analysts should continue to break embargoes. Medical journals and conferences have had their days and should go away.