Word: marketeers
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Perusing the list of the top 200 companies (with a market cap of at least $250 million) produces a number of surprises. There is Apple, but no Microsoft. The Boston Beer Company makes an appearance, but not market leader Anheuser-Busch. Tractor Supply lands on the list; Wal-Mart doesn't. Even with the economic crisis, a number of financial firms show up, including asset manager Blackrock, regional bank Iberiabank and homebuilder NVR (parent of Ryan Homes). The decade's best industry: oil and natural gas. A full 34 companies - 17% of the list - either drill, transport, refine or sell...
...course, as is always the case with the stock market, a company's past performance, magnificent though it may be, doesn't necessarily indicate what's going to happen in the future. In fact, today's chart-toppers are often tomorrow's laggards. Still, with a decade of solid returns already on the books, maybe there's more reason than there usually is to believe that these companies have staying power...
...dropping sick customers and cherry-picking healthy ones is one way insurers currently stay profitable. But thanks to a provision inserted into the Senate health care bill at the last minute, the federal government may soon require insurers to "lose" 80% of premiums collected in the large group market and 85% in the individual and small group market. Insurers who don't operate at or above these thresholds would have to send rebates to customers. (MLRs are generally higher in the large group market because selling and administering one policy for many people at once requires much less overhead than...
Earlier this year Rockefeller - who is chairman of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee - launched an investigation into MLRs. According to Rockefeller, in 2008, insurers in the individual market spent an average of 74% of premiums on health care, compared with 80% in the small group market and 84% in the large group market; some insurers cited in the final report spent as little as 66% of premiums on actual care. CIGNA, one of the insurance companies cited, says investigators erred in calculating the company's medical loss ratios. Where the report said CIGNA spent 87% of premiums...
Following the commerce committee investigation, one of the country's largest insurers - Aetna - admitted it had misreported its revenues in a way that overstated its MLR in the small group market. The company recently amended its filings to indicate that it had incorrectly categorized $4.9 billion of premiums; the revised figures changed its MLR average in the small group market from 82% to 79%, a significant change...