User 178215

Wellpoint Says Price Hikes Will Fix Its Bottom Line; Analysts are Skeptical

With Wellpoint's competitors having better margins and better management it's better to invest in them rather than Wellpoint. The whole healthcare sector is changing and trying to penalize or disincentivize the seniors in their Medicare Advantage plan will bode badly for wellpoint. Already they've cut their commissions to their brokers who are pushing for the other insurances who are better run. Doctors in California are disenrolling since Blue Cross now pays below Medicare rates. S&P 500 just downgraded Wellpoint. Also Wellpoint's investment losses are troubling if you look at the fine print. I wouldn't catch a falling knife as of yet. The other companies are just better run.

Congress to Clamp Down on Health Insurers' Sharply Higher Co-Pays?

What thing that people haven't really talked about is that Wellpoint and all these insurance companies similar to AIG actually invested in mortgaged back securities and subprime (that's what they do with the premiums) but it hasn't been reflected in the stock prices yet. The last warning from Wellpoint didn't even write down their mortgage back securities $500million of which were subprime. :( Everyone's talking about value investing but one only needs to look at the recent Yahoo message boards and see how unhappy the employees are and how much the insiders have sold off in the last year. They've left skeleton crews while spending millions outsourcing customer service overseas (I spent 2 hours on one call for a patient last year) that ended up with a lot of snafus. People say it's well run- it hasn't because of the merger with Anthem.