Health

While the American Healthcare Act, President Trump’s first major legislative effort, is going to a vote in the House of Representatives on Friday - no matter what; for many years now, the American healthcare system has been flawed.

As Statista's Feliz Richter illustrates in the chart below, U.S. health spending per capita (including public and private spending) is higher than it is anywhere else in the world, and yet, the country lags behind other nations in several aspects such as life expectancy and health insurance coverage.

Given today's vote fiasco, this seemed highly appropriate...

If you are an older senior citizen and can no longer take care of yourself and need Long-Term Care, but the government says there is no Nursing Home care available for you, what do you do?

 

You may opt for Medicare Part G.

 

CBO has scored the revised RyanCare plan that was released on Monday night (notably not with amendments that have likely been discussed this week with the Freedom Caucus) and it is even worse... considerably less budget deficit reduction, the same number of uninsured, and similar effects on healthcare premium. 

CBO Comparison With the Previous Estimate

With the time for today's critical vote rapidly approaching, traders, pundits and the general population were eagerly looking forward to Paul Ryan's rescheduled 3:30pm press conference (it was originally supposed to take place before noon). It now appears that they will have to wait some more, because moments ago the press conference was postponed for a second time, and this time it was delayed until further notice...

The Trump administration faces a major legislative test today with the health-care vote, and for those attempting to trade the event, Bloomberg's Cameron Crise notes that risk-takers need to ask themselves two questions...

1) Do I have an edge?

At this point the vote is too close to call. Unless you have someone in DC counting votes alongside the whip, the honest answer is almost certainly “no”

2) Does this vote matter?