| The irony is that there is a very high chance the drop was caused by fake information, not from the Twitter accounts, but rather from the US government's BLS. You see, back in October, they decided that inflation is too high so it's time to tweak the formula so it doesn't look so bad. Energy would be too obvious, but health insurance is the perfect component to tweak![1]. So what happened in this week's CPI print? Well inflation still went up - a crushing 0.4% Month over Month, or 7.7% Year over Year, but because inflation has been so bad, this rate of inflation is an improvement[2]. The market was quite pleased. But what about healthcare inflation? Well it made a 50 year record by reporting -0.6%. That's right, according to the BLS, healthcare costs went down 0.6% MoM. To anyone with healthcare insurance or medical costs, they know this is an absolutely fake number. Even among analysts that work the sector, they knew the number was going to be suppressed, but not by this much. But what would a not-very-savvy investor do when he sees the CPI print 0.4% this month, and their healthcare sector investments print -0.6%? Why - and this is the technical term - shit your pants of course. I mean the sector is losing 1% per month to inflation. Sell, sell, sell! I need that money in sectors that are keeping up, like literally everything else. So let's give it up for the US government, tweaking the CPI calculation once more, to under-report real inflation and screw over everyone else. It's a time-longed tradition going as far back as fiat currencies. And kudos to the mainstream media apparatus for using the event to smear their ideological enemies instead of broaching the subject with a modicum of thinking. And if you're curious, here's the best an army of government academics can get you when you need healthcare CPI to drop: https://www.bls.gov/cpi/factsheets/medical-care.htm Scroll down to "Health Insurance". --- [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-10-03/why-healt... [2] https://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.nr0.htm |
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Prior to April 2021, part of the retained earnings calculation included premiums and benefits data from a national nonprofit health insurance carrier. This data was replaced by National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC).
In October 2022, the retained earnings calculation began including premium and benefit expenditures for Medicare Part D. Previously, these Medicare Part D expenditures were not included.
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