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October 16, 2017 at 03:10 PM
There are two things President Donald Trump seems to enjoy about the stock market: watching it go up during his presidency, and sending down the shares of individual companies with his tweets or remarks.
A few hours after tweeting about the market’s gains since his November election, Trump was also talking about tanking health insurance stocks. He also sent drugmakers down Monday with comments about U.S. pharmaceutical prices.
“The U.S. has gained more than 5.2 trillion dollars in Stock Market Value since Election Day!” Trump tweeted Monday morning.
(Related: Math Geniuses Size Up 5 ACA Change Ideas)
Later in the day, Trump pointed out that insurers had benefited for years from Affordable Care Act subsidies he abruptly halted last week. The implication: The party’s over for their stocks.
“That was a subsidy for the insurance companies,” Trump said at a Monday cabinet meeting in Washington. “What they gave the insurance companies — take a look at their stocks. Take a look at where there stocks were when Obamacare was originally approved,” he said of the increase in health insurance shares since 2010.
Trump frequently tweets about the rise in the markets, or retweets accounts that show the same. The Standard and Poor’s 500 Index is up 36% since the 2016 election, a continuation of the almost decade-long rally that began in 2009 and has seen the gauge more than triple.
He made similar remarks about insurers in a tweet over the weekend.
“Health Insurance stocks, which have gone through the roof during the ObamaCare years, plunged yesterday after I ended their Dems windfall!” he tweeted.
Insurer and hospital shares dropped Friday after the Trump administration said it would end what are known as cost-sharing reduction subsidy payments, or CSRs. The subsidies — which go to issuers of Affordable Care Act public exchange plans to help lower-income people with co-pays and other cost-sharing — were “a total gift, Trump said. “You could almost call it a payoff, and it’s a disgrace.”
Drug Stocks
