Nobody would be willing to say that the Senate’s version of health care reform is perfect. But if you subscribe to the “you shall know them by their enemies” point of view, a new report from Oppenheimer Equity Research should give supporters of the bill some hope. The most hated groups in America, Wall Street and the insurance industry, are not very solicitous of the bill, and in fact they want to kill it.

It’s fun to read this report, and invert the qualifiers, from “positive” to “negative”, etc., to conform to reality. For example:

For the insurance industry, there’s a litany of troubling news, including a
government run plan, the weak mandate, a 3 to 1 pricing band on community
rates, and a cap on profits and administrative costs. On a positive note, most of
the changes wouldn’t be implemented until 2014.

This writer isn’t only a polemicist, but he’s frequently wrong. The caps on profits, otherwise known as the medical loss ratio, goes into effect immediately and sunsets in 2014, rather than being implemented at that date. Which is bad policy, by the way.

The report openly acknowledges that the good move for health insurance companies would be to “increase their cash reserves” in the years prior to implementation of the major reforms. This basically means that they should gouge their customers and make as much many as possible through the old way of doing things until those practices become illegal.

Here’s the writer talking about how sad it is that the bill doesn’t rip off old people more:

The community rating pricing band is set at 3 to 1. This means that the price of the most expensive policy can’t be more than 3 times greater than the least
expensive policy. This is better than the 2 to 1 band in the House bill, but not as
generous as the 4 to 1 band in the Senate Finance bill. The narrower the rating
band becomes, the more the young and healthy have to pay to subsidize the cost
of insurance for the older and sicker.

Then we get to the end of the report, and my favorite part, the litany of disclosures. It turns out that Oppenheimer Funds does investment banking services for Amerigroup, Coventry Health Care, Triple-S Management Corp., HealthSpring, Magellan Health Services, Molina Healthcare, and Universal American Corp. The health of their profits directly impacts Oppenheimer’s personal financial health.