Zacks Analyst Blog Highlights: Wellpoint, Humana and Aetna.

CHICAGO -- Zacks.com announces the list of stocks featured in the Analyst Blog. Every day the Zacks Equity Research analysts discuss the latest news and events impacting stocks and the financial markets. Stocks recently featured in the blog include: Wellpoint (NYSE: WPT), Humana (NYSE: HUM) and

See the latest posts to the Analyst Blog by visiting: http://at.zacks.com/?id=2673.

Here are highlights from Tuesday's Analyst Blog:

Poverty & Health Care

There was finally some good news on the poverty front as the poverty rate fell to 12.3% in 2006 from 12.6% in 2005. Virtually all of the improvement came among Hispanics where the rate declined to 20.6% from 21.8%. Poverty also declined significantly among the elderly, where the poverty rate fell to 9.4% from 10.1% in 2005.

The bad news is that the overall poverty rate is still well below its year 2000 low of 11.3%. Children are more likely to be poor, with a poverty rate of 17.4%, unchanged from last year, than working age people who had a poverty rate of 10.8%, also unchanged from 2005. By region, poverty rose slightly in the Northeast to 11.5%, but fell in the other three regions. The South continues to have the highest poverty rate at 13.8%.

Unlike the news on income and poverty, which was sort of a mixed bag, there were a few hopeful emerging trends after several years of awful news. But the same cannot be said about the health insurance section of the report. The best that can be said is that the size of the untapped market for Wellpoint (NYSE: WPT), Humana (NYSE: HUM) and Aetna (NYSE: AET) is growing. The percentage of Americans without health insurance grew to 15.8% in 2006 from 15.3% in 2005.

In absolute numbers, there were 47 million uninsured up from 44.8 million in 2005. The percentage of people covered by employment-based coverage dropped to 59.7% from 60.2% in 2005. Meanwhile, the percentage of people covered by government programs (Medicare, Medicaid, VA) fell to 27.0% from 27.3%. In what is sure to become a widely quoted figure in the context of the current political debate on the S-CHIP program, the rate of uninsured among children rose to 11.7% from 10.9%.

See the latest posts to the Analyst Blog by visiting http://at.zacks.com/?id=2645.

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