Peak Prosperity - Unexpected Rise in Disease Sinks U.S. Insurance Companies

Episode Date: July 5, 2025

Unexpected rates of sickness (morbidity) has sunk the stock price of a major US health insurer (Centene or CNC). Maybe now we can finally have an open conversation about the causes?Click Here for Part 2

A scary signal seems to have arisen within the US healthcare industry where they're seeing deaths and disabilities and sickness that they didn't expect. The following is the audio version of a video released at peakprosperity.com. Visit peakprosperity.com to watch the video and to find other insightful content such as articles, discussion forums, and to find other insightful content such as articles, discussion forums, and exclusive subscriber only content. Hello everyone. I'm Dr. Chris Martinson of Peak Prosperity.

We're going to be discussing this today, which is the excess deaths in morbidity, that's sickness, illness, that have hit the US health insurance companies. today which is the excess deaths and morbidity that's sickness illness that have hit the US health insurance companies and this just came out last week July 2nd on Wednesday centine the health insurance company crashed that little you can see way over here that little red blob right there is the stock price sure it looked like it had a what we call a head and shoulders it was due for a correction but that's massive what What happened, and by the way, this is not a small company. This is a very, very large company.

If you haven't heard of it, it's very big. So going to Grok, which is now Super Grok, by the way, there's a share link down there if you wanna find the same language I just got up here. So what happened was on July 1st, Centene announced that it was withdrawing 2025 generally accepted accounting procedures gap and and and pulled all of its all of its guidance for 2025 shocked investors.

The reason for the withdrawal was that in 22 of 29 of its health insurance marketplace states that 72% of its membership revealed one lower market growth Enrollment growth was slower than anticipated. So oops, right Was it growing slower because there are fewer people to enroll maybe because the other bullet point was they were experiencing higher morbidity patients were significantly sicker than expected leading to higher medical. This was materially inconsistent with the company's assumptions for risk adjustment revenue transfers, which are federal reimbursements to balance the risk of ensuring less healthy population. So they have these massive actuarial tables. They're sort of like, if you know how many people get sick per hundred thousand, you

bit stays in that band and that's pretty tight well that's not what happened their risk models got blown out people substantially sicker than expected so how do we account for that well we're going to take a look at that but first here's the stock price itself and you can see that massive plummet over here and then very helpfully later in the day these yellow dots would be analysts downgrading the stock. It's amazing how they work. Now, that's a huge decline, nearly 38% in the past couple of days here. That is a big decline. So who are the bag holders? Well, the usual crowd. That would be Vanguard, Black Rock, FMR, Norges Bank, State Street Corp, Harris Associates. Those are the biggest bag

holders, but Vanguard, the biggest bag holder of them all holding eleven point five six percent of all outstanding shares So so that's pretty Pretty big deal Anyway, these are the bag holders usual usual suspects in their wall streets wall streets now not very happy of course pensions not very happy Individual people holding ETFs and things like that also not very happy carrying on Individual people holding ETFs and things like that also not very happy carrying on Molina health care also down about 18% over the past few days here

Elevance health is down 6.7 percent six point eight percent not that bad United health not down that much over the last few days But of course down 40 percent over the past six months because it's past three months really over the past six months because it's past three months really but it's having an extraordinary difficulty in fact when we look at the overall health care sector in general remember this was supposed to be the decade of the health care they're gonna know this health care they're gonna just they're cramming premiums up people's rear ends and denying claims and doing all sorts of things and it turns out when you look at the XLV, which is a healthcare

broad ETF of the healthcare sector compared to the SPY so you divide the XLV by the SPY which is the S&P 500 If that nut line is falling then the XLV is under performing under performing Why because the denominator is getting bigger bigger so the overall number is getting smaller And so what do we see well, this is the biggest underperformance in the past 24 years so Healthcare not doing all that great of course did fantastically well in the context of the Obamacare It's been sort of bouncing for a while you would think COVID would have sort of really juiced it, but now it's really cratering. Why is that? Well,

one of the things is if you have to pay for sick people, and there are a lot more sick people for some reason, here is total population with a disability. Now this is a self declared status. They do a survey, they say, have you had a disability, something, some condition, which has prevented you from doing X, Y, or Z, going upstairs, holding a job, things like that. And then people say yes or no. And so the number of people who've declared that they have a disability went from averaging about 29 to 31, so that's about a two million person range.

So let's call it averaging around 30 million, just truck it along here, 2014, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, even through COVID, no big change. Everything's bouncing. But in May of 2021, it broke out of that box. And now people with a disability is up four and a half million since then. Hmm. What could account for that increase of such a rapid and dramatic increase? Four and a half million more people on top of all the old other ones, more

people self declaring as having a disability that started in 2021. That would be the kind of thing that normally would get me a strike and or a CDC message down at the bottom of this because you still can't talk about this for some reason here's the data and There's still some sensitivity about it, but you know what I? Don't care about their feelings so if you are That 26 year old with a man bun who's got my account in that cubicle out there in San Francisco And you're thinking of hmm should I strike this guy press the button because here we go

We also know that the US military had unexpected and unexplained deaths for reasons something Related you know just illness right so they have a very Very stable line here was the trend illness related deaths had been trending down for quite a while in the US military doing a better job of making sure they don't have illness related deaths and they have this big spike that spiked out in 2021. So in 2020 they had 43 extra unexpected deaths or excess deaths. They had 106 though in 2021. So that's another 61 people even beyond 2020 that died and it's not kovat in 2021. So what what could that be and then in 2022 another 28

Every one of those is not a statistic. It's tragedy. So what could account for that and then Also, we might note that in May of 2025 Also, we might note that in May of 2025, the United States Social Security Administration reported the largest single monthly drop in Social Security payments on record, a massive 7.3% decline in Social Security payments. So normally this thing bounces a little bit. Mostly it's green, it's way up green

because there are more people retiring each and every year, so they're making more and more payments. And then this. Hmm. Why are there suddenly not as many people to be paying money to you? I know they're supposed to be, potentially. Potentially this could be explained by rooting out some of the fraud, waste and abuse. We know that Doge found, I don't know, millions of people who were on the rolls allegedly

but who didn't belong in there because they were either dead or non-existent. That's possible, but I think those are going to hit in future months. I don't think they've quite rooted those out yet, but maybe that's it. It's always possible, but still it's a data point for us. Carrying on, we would note that this isn't just US-centric, that for some reason New Zealand and Australia had this huge excess mortality spike, not in 2020 during COVID, not even early in 2021, but up here by 2022, massive increases in

mortality. So this is deaths per 100,000. Normally let's say, and you can see the trend here was just fewer and fewer and fewer, right? So either your population is getting healthier or younger or something, but that's or it's smaller. The population is smaller overall. But for the most part, this would be since deaths per hundred thousand, the prime explanations would be you're getting healthier and healthier or younger.

And so you can see the trend happening here for a while, but then it breaks out of this box right here in 2021 and goes spikes way up So instead of say the expected maybe 700 deaths per hundred thousand now, they're seeing mmm 761 and 31 so yeah 3050 more deaths than expected per hundred thousand. That's a lot of people when you're talking about populations of millions what could the explanation be now we'll get to that explanation in just a minute and I'm gonna talk about fertility rates too very quickly I want to just talk about the testimonials we get at peak

prosperity among our subscribers these are all unsolicited people just all on their own right in here's one I'm gonna give you two just for May. Rob Laporte right in, Chris's emerging synopsis is a reason I subscribe here. The reasoning backing his thesis is solid and detailed way beyond what can be summarized even in an hour, but, and he goes on to explain that, that's what I do each and every week.

I take my thinking cap, I put it on. In this case, we were talking about AI and the signs we're seeing there are lots of warning signs there Now as well somebody said from goes up said Chris I greatly appreciate you continually analyzing the irrationality and how it's not organic. It's keeping me from going crazy Knowing that I'm not the only one who sees it so goes up. Yeah, that's big reason I do what I do so that we all know that we're going crazy You're not going crazy. You're not alone. So if you like this kind of content

This is just from the past week over at peak prosperity If you haven't seen this one on property tax fraud, you're gonna want to do that But after taking your blood pressure medication, it is infuriating just what a massive fraud property taxes have become in the US I do a weekly fat pipe, which is just a big breakdown of all kinds of topics day fair text writes these amazing Sunday Every Sunday we get an amazing market update very goes very deep and then this is a public piece here You can tell it doesn't have a little premium tag on it But if you found your slipping names or nouns not able to complete sentences or like you just have to work harder to think You're gonna want or nouns, not able to complete sentences, or like you just have to work harder to think. You're going to want to check that piece out.

That's a really good piece. A lot of great comments on that. And then also last Friday I talked about how, well, if we're lucky, we've got two more years for the digital prison is sort of constructed. So if you're interested in all that peak prosperity.com membership, please come by. We would love to have you as members because we are entirely supported by our membership no conflicts of interest now back to the storyline German fertility rates have plummeted so here you can see is by age groups of 15 year olds 16 year olds 17 year olds 18

year olds and so on clocking on all the way through year by year to 49 year olds down here this would be how many births do you get? right Within this age group per 1,000 women so this is hovering at 15 year olds hovers right around zero see that range goes from 6 to minus 4 so that's the zero mark right there pretty much. They don't have teenage pregnancies They're in Germany 16 year olds. Nope 17 year olds. Nope now 18 They're starting to have see here. They expect to have 30 births per thousand women

Something happened right at 2020 a very normal amount, but then it starts clocking down It clocked down from 30 to just under 20 within the 18 year old group now look at the range now This is hovering around with an average of around 42 Births per thousand women who are 19 years old and again 2020 fine 2021 sort of okay, but now really falling off from say 43 down to 30 That's a huge decline within 20 year olds same Same process within 21 year olds. Same process. Let's go jump all the way to the prime childbearing years in Germany, which would

be the years 27 to about 32 or 33 or so. Now you can see they're expecting huge number of births. It should be between 140 and 200. So this declines off all the way from it was already declining even before they got to COVID within 27s and 28 year olds but you can see these big drop-offs which are peeling off 10s and 20s of births live births look at this one here for 30 year olds a very prime age-bearing age for maternity and childbearing women and 30 years old in Germany.

Going from, let's call that 250 here in 2020, having fallen off all the way to about 175 here in 2024 with the last time they took this snapshot. Massive declines in 37 year olds. Interestingly, by the time you get to 44 and beyond it sort of levels out there aren't really big declines But where do you see it starting with the 18 year olds on through mid 30s just catastrophic declines and fertility rates again Centered around something that happened mostly looking at these charts somewhere around 20 21 Now what could that be? Once again, we're gonna turn to Jeff Childers who

I think just captured a lot of this really beautifully. He talking, writing here about the Centene Corporation stock crash which we opened with. He said here the crash in the yellow part quote was caused by devastating new actuarial data showing that Centene's Affordable Care Act, that's Obamacare, enrollees are sicker and costlier and fewer than expected, especially in 22 states where Centene holds significant market share. Next yellow part. Now analysts warn that the Obamacare risk pool is unraveling with spiking Medicaid costs and mispriced premiums dragging down the entire industry, bluntly insurers at bet on healthy growth,

but have hemorrhaging patients instead. Centene Corporation is one of the largest health insurance providers in the United States, specializing in government sponsored programs like Medicaid, Medicare Advantage, and Affordable Care Act Marketplace plans. Headquartered in St. Louis, Centene serves over 28 million members.

That's about a tenth of the entire country, primarily low income and vulnerable populations, making it a bellwether for the broader managed care industry. Yeah. Okay. This is a big number sample. This isn't a small company that had a little something that happened out of band. By the time you have 28 million people in your database, you know how sick they are gonna be. You know how many live births you should expect.

You know how many surgeries you're gonna have. I mean, it's all pretty well known. The law of large numbers makes that a very sticky number unless something really drastically changes. If something really drastic happens, like I don't know, there's a war, famine, pestilence, like it has to be something really dramatic to make a law of large numbers Figure like this go this far off the reservation, but that's what happened

They got it just not just wrong, but really wrong so Jeff here goes on to speculate He says quote sentines customers are possibly the most heavily jab propagandized populations on planet earth Centene's customers are possibly the most heavily jab propagandized populations on planet Earth. Its core customer base includes Medicaid recipients, ACA exchange enrollees, and Medicare Advantage members i.e. seniors and low-income working-age folks. These are precisely the populations that faced the most aggressive vaccine outreach, were most subject to institutional mandates and incentives and had the fewest

options to resist or opt out." End quote. So is that an explanatory function? It's possible. Now, just as a reminder, you remember what we went to went through? Remember we were looking at a winter of severe illness and death. This came to us from Jeff Zients speaking for Biden, if such a thing is possible. Remember this, you know, New York Post reporting in July of 2021 before any real data had come

in because remember the jabs were just put into place in July, sorry, January of 2021. So here in July of 2021, unvaccinated people entering death lottery, West Virginia Governor Jim Justice says, looks like he may have had that backwards. But don't forget, you were told in no uncertain terms in September of 2021 that you were 11 times more likely to die from COVID if you were unvaccinated. 11 times doesn't scare. How about 20 times? you were 20 times more likely to die from COVID-19 according to Texas still not scared. Would you believe 97 times nine you were 97 times more likely to die from COVID if you

were unvaccinated than if you were boosted according to the CDC this point in time. Turns out all of that was actually wrong. Um, not just wrong, but stupendously wrong, fraudulent data, all this and that. Remember how it started? Newsweek in August of 21 saying, are you unvaccinated? Well, then it's time to make an end of life plan. And then in June of 2025, they say, ah, COVID vaccines, heart risk warning update now issued by the FDA. So listen, folks, this was, there's,

we don't know for sure what's causing the fertility, the morbidity and the death issues. But there's one thing that correlates with those times really tightly. And at a minimum, it needs to be conclusively ruled out or ruled in One way or the other we got if we have to get to the bottom of the data And so that's what I'm hoping RFK jr. Does that's what I'm hoping we finally do can we just have the data enough of the gas?

Lighting enough of the correlation does not equal causation well Yes, it does if you see it often enough if I hear a bang, and then I have a hole in my body And that guy's got a gun. I think I'm free to conclude that this is a causative event that happened right here so with that just remember it didn't have to be this way we knew things in 2022 we knew things in 2021 we knew things even in 2020 that really could have changed this all but we're starting to see big impacts now now that it's finally hitting dollars Now that it's finally hitting Wall Street now that health insurance and life insurance companies are getting smoked Maybe now now that money's involved will we care enough?

Maybe it's so disappointing my fellow humans at any rate. That's my report for today I will be going on for subscribers on the July 4th here report in 2025 we're gonna talk about this war on reality market additions three warning signs here as far as I'm concerned that equities are are very stretched and in unstable territory so with that step on by if you want to talk about finance and markets and things like that I will see all of you at peak Prosperity back home. Everybody else have a great weekend. I hope you're enjoying your 4th of July.

Bye for now. you