After Scott Brown’s win in the Massachusetts special election yesterday, Democrats are scrambling to save the future of healthcare reform. The situation is bleak, but they still have a couple options. Here is the best one so far: House Democrats would accept the Senate version of the bill, then make a list of things to [...]

Today is voting day in Massachusetts, where a special election is being held for the Senate seat once held by the late Ted Kennedy. The Republican candidate Scott Brown has all the momentum, despite an impassioned appeal Obama made to Democrats in the state this weekend. The most recent polls show Coakley falling from a [...]

Leading Democrats met on Tuesday night and agreed that they would not go through the formal reconciliation process. According to The Hill: The decision was made to scrap a conference committee out of concern that Republicans in both the House and the Senate would employ a series of procedural delaying tactics, only serving to delay [...]

The only thing holding up healthcare debate in the Senate right now is a prolonged estimate from the CBO on the cost of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s bill. This means it could come to a vote as early as next week. After the House bill passed by such a narrow margin (420-415) earlier this [...]

Don Dion, an important ETF commentator at thestreet.com, had a great piece (subscription required) with the same basic hypothesis that we have been advancing here for some time. He points out that the same healthcare ETFs that dipped when Obama was elected are making gains after the GOP won the Virginia and New Jersey governorships [...]

Since May 21, we have been tracking a number of stocks in our own Stockpickr healthcare portfolio. We have an average return of roughly 10% as well as a 100% success rate. Today we updated the portfolio to accommodate a pessimistic attitude towards the health insurance industry. We also added a couple solid biotech companies. [...]

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has an impressive record with passing big votes, but according to this article on The Hill a robust public option may be too much for the Congress to handle. Pelosi is relying on a complex series of whips to keep the factional Democratic party in line. There are two votes that [...]

House Majority Leader Harry Reid called a special press conference today to announce that the senate healthcare bill will not pass without a public option. Politically speaking, this does little to make the passage of a bill with a public option more probable. This is a longshot strategy considering Senator Reid did not yet have [...]

A bill to freeze cuts to doctors’ Medicare payments – one that should have been heavily bipartisan – is now in serious danger of passing. The American Medical Association (AMA) promised Majority Leader Harry Reid (D) 27 Republican votes, but now it appears there are as few as two. Undoubtedly, 27 is an ambitious number [...]

A recent Wall Street Journal article has confirmed what we have been saying here at Election Stocks for weeks. They astutely note that the Senate Finance Committee bill will likely “form the backbone of any final legislation.” This lends itself easily to our shared conclusion, as seen in this below excerpt from our post on [...]