Winners: Health insurers. The stock price of Centene, a major Medicaid and ACA marketplace insurer, has multiplied by 12 times or 1,100%. Shares of UnitedHealth Group have jumped by more than 700%.
Insurers weathered cuts to Medicare Advantage and new requirements forcing them to cover sick people, but in return they got millions of taxpayer-subsidized customers through Medicaid expansion and the individual marketplaces.
Wall Street analysts say investors and companies were afraid the ACA was going to hurt the profitability of employer plans and Medicare Advantage. That never happened.
The federal deficit is now 17% higher than it was at the end of the last fiscal year, according to figures the Treasury Department released this week — but that just begins to tell the story of all the red ink we've been building up. Here's how the deficits have grown, shrunk, and grown again over the last 58 years.
