Plunge in Health-Insurance Stocks Recalls ‘Dark Days’ of the Financial Crisis
Health-Insurer Rout Finished Long Before 2020 Vote, Goldman Says
(Bloomberg) -- The free-fall in health insurance stocks is reviving memories of the 2008 financial crisis on Wall Street.
"In recent days the stocks have behaved more like they did in the dark days of 2008-2010, when we were dealing with relentless EPS guidance cuts, a global stock market meltdown, a severe global economic recession, and a deeply unsettling ACA sausage-making process in D.C.," Stephens analyst Scott Fidel wrote in a note, after the insurance stocks, along with hospitals, lost $28 billion in market value on Tuesday.
The S&P 500 Managed Health Care Index extended its slump on Wednesday, falling another 5.5 percent, led by losses in Anthem Inc., UnitedHealth Group Inc., Centene Corp. and Humana Inc. The benchmark is now down 13 percent for the year, significantly underperforming the broader market.
Despite slashing their price targets on industry bellwether UnitedHealth as political concerns outweighed an earnings beat, some analysts -- chief among them those at Goldman Sachs -- remain optimistic that the sell-off will stop well before November 2020.
“This moment in time is not unprecedented,” Goldman’s Stephen Tanal wrote in a note to clients, as “managed care stocks tend to suffer bouts of volatility and severe multiple compression ahead of presidential elections.” Tanal added that the stocks "tend to stop going down well in advance of the election."
Compared to other recent retreats, including a 16 percent rout ahead of the 2016 election, these stocks are likely closer to the bottom than not, Tanal noted. A recovery will hinge on whether it appears a single-payer policy would truly ban private health insurance policies, he said.
Hospitals extended losses too, after joining the sell-off yesterday. Tenet Healthcare Corp. is down 13.4 percent, and the largest publicly-traded hospital, HCA Healthcare Inc., fell 3.6 percent after its biggest slump since the 2016 election on Tuesday.
The drop for HCA is overdone, Jefferies analyst Brian Tanquilut told clients, noting “we will still need hospitals to be viable even if Medicare for All is enacted.”
With health-care services now trading at steep discounts, BMO analyst Matt Borsch called yesterday’s sell-off the continuation of a “contagious unwind” for once-favored stocks. “While we can’t predict the turning point here, we do not believe it is far away,” he said.
To contact the reporters on this story: Cristin Flanagan in New York at cflanagan1@bloomberg.net;Tatiana Darie in New York at tdarie1@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Catherine Larkin at clarkin4@bloomberg.net, Steven Fromm, Scott Schnipper
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