Healthcare Giants Sleeping Soundly at Night With Biden in the 2020 Race

By Libby Watson | May 21, 2019 | 2:37pm

Elections

Remember last month, when Wall Street pissed its $3,000 pants (COME ON!) over the possibility of Medicare for All? Well, the pants are now bone-dry and the bankers inside them are soothed. Jim Cramer, a shouty man with a suspect past and a poor record, had a reassuring sentiment for the elite last night: Don’t worry about your healthcare stocks, because Joe Biden has got this locked up, and he’s not going to fuck with you.

As CNBC reported, Cramer said last night on his show that it was “obvious” the health insurance industry would be fine after Joe Biden announced his 2020 campaign:

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“Overnight, it became safe to own the managed care stocks again. Don’t worry, it’s not too late. The political risk was most reduced,” Cramer said. Pointing out that the Democratic leadership in Congress is also against a single-payer system, “with Biden leading in the polls, it’s more obvious that the health insurance business will be just fine.”

(Managed care is the most common type of health insurance, where patients are restricted to networks of doctors, and is increasingly used with state Medicaid plans.)

Cramer also noted that Biden’s frontrunner status is “good news” for big pharma and hospital chains. He’s not wrong! Biden is indeed opposed to Medicare for All, instead favoring a public option and making bizarre comments about how businesses shouldn’t be let off the hook for paying for health insurance.

Democrats can make their own decisions in the primary for any reason they like, and they will. Many of them seem to be guided by false notions of electability; but according to the New Republic, the Progressive Change Campaign Committee’s Adam Green said his organization’s internal polling revealed “barely a majority of Biden’s own current supporters believe he would be the best Democratic president.”

I don’t personally believe that Biden is such a strong frontrunner that nothing can knock him off. It’s early; no one knows what the fuck will happen. But I know one thing: The people who are most interested in Biden winning are not your average Democratic primary voters, who are spoiled for choice this year and have favorable opinions of many of the candidates. The people who most want to see him win are health insurance, hospital, and pharmaceutical executives, who want nothing more than to silence all talk of Medicare for All, and the people who are most heavily invested in those companies’ continued success—which means continued profiteering off the pain and death of regular Americans.

Basically, if you’re looking for a way to decide which Democrat would be best for America, picking someone Jim Cramer wouldn’t like is a good bet.