The health-care sector just closed out a third straight month in the red, its longest losing streak in three years. A fourth monthly decline would be its worst stretch since 2011, and one trader says there could be more pain ahead.
Amazon, Walmart, and Best Buy are three of the biggest names in retail. And despite the ruthless competitive nature of their relationship, all three are currently thriving. But over the past few years, each of these companies has been planning to venture into a completely new industry, one that's worth almost four trillion dollars and is inviting disruption: It's the health care industry.
Uncertainty surrounding the 2020 U.S. election outcome prompted BMO Capital to downgrade healthcare providers UnitedHealth Group and Humana on Monday, though Cigna was upgraded for similar reasons.
The debate over healthcare and how it should proceed has apparently come down to either keeping what we've got, going back to what we had, or Medicare for All. At least, that's how things are being framed for a coming presidential election. At stake is the cost and delivery of 17.9% of the country's entire gross domestic product—$3.5 trillion in 2017 and heading north from there.
Sitting at the edge of the gently undulating landscape of the Flint Hills in east-central Kansas, the town of Hillsboro boasts a small hospital that has survived a remarkable roller coaster ride even as other rural hospitals stagger and fail. Nine months ago, everything seemed to be coming apart at the 15-bed facility, Hillsboro Community Hospital, which traces its roots back more than a century.
The idea of Americans scrolling through hospital websites to find the best deal on a mammogram or tonsillectomy sounds good to almost everybody. But the devil is in the details, and when federal plans emerged to force hospitals and insurers to reveal their negotiated rates for all kinds of medical services, the pitchforks came out.