So Much for 'Tough' Reform: Insurance Stocks Soaring

Barack Obama praised the Senate yesterday for “standing up to the special interests who prevented reform for decades,” which seems pretty laughable, given that health care stocks soared on the news. Evan Bayh’s wife, for example, has made up to $250,000 over the last six weeks as her employee stock in Wellpoint has risen. There are good arguments for this bill, writes Glenn Greenwald of Salon, but “the notion that Democrats have ‘stood up to the special interests’ is too blatantly false, insultingly so, to tolerate.”

Obama’s strategy, from the beginning, was to negotiate the bill behind closed doors with those same special interests. As a result, “this bill is unquestionably one of the greatest boons in recent history for the private health insurance industry,” writes Greenwald. “It should lead a rational person to want to buy large amounts of stock in Goldman Sachs and Citigroup in anticipation of the upcoming ‘reform’ of that industry.” (More health care reform stories.)