posted on August 23, 2012
Obamacare And The Medicaid “Opportunity”

Filed under 2012 Elections, National Healthcare


You know we’ve gone through the looking glass when the hottest health care money on Wall Street is chasing Medicaid.
No, I didn’t mean Medicare, the $560 billion per year federal program for insuring the elderly that has launched a thousand IPOs. The current darling of health care investors is Medicaid, the hybrid federal-state program for insuring the poor that now dominates, and often overwhelms, state government budgets.
Last month, Wellpoint agreed to pay $4.5 billion for Amerigroup, a Medicaid managed care company, representing a nearly 50% premium over Amerigroup’s market price. Not to be outdone, Aetna this past week purchased Coventry for $5.7 billion, which also services Medicaid populations. These deals and several others like them rumored to be in the pipeline have driven up the share prices of Amerigroup’s competitors – other Medicaid managed care companies like Centene and Molinas – in anticipation of the latest round of monkey-see, monkey-acquire deals by health insurers.
Post Continues on www.forbes.com


Obamacare And The Medicaid “Opportunity”