Health Care Poised to Weather Obamacare's Fate

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- Investors will soon realize not all health care stocks are equal as the Supreme Court prepares to decide Obamacare's fate.

The good is for companies like Aetna(AET) , Cigna(CI) and Coventry(CVH) , which profit across the three major segments of Medicare, Medicaid and commercial health insurance. The bad is for the Medicaid HMOs like Amerigroup(AGP) , Molina(MOH) and Centene(CNC) .

"The companies that would be worst affected if the law were thrown out entirely ... you'd expect probably the Medicaid players, which would be Molina, Amerigroup, Centene, to fare poorly, given that they were hoping to take advantage of Medicaid expansion, which almost certainly wouldn't be resurrected if the law were thrown out," said Matthew Coffina, senior health care analyst at Morningstar.

Some estimates have found that between 16 million to 20 million new Americans would be eligible to enroll in Medicaid if the Supreme Court upholds Obamacare.

If Obamacare as a whole gets thrown out, Medicaid HMOs would lose a large revenue opportunity they had expected to begin in 2014.

Medicaid enrollment would rise in 2014 because the law stipulated a shift in income eligibility; simply, the government would extend its low-income health insurance program to earners with a higher annual income than what is currently allowed.

The catch here is that these companies exposed to Medicaid expansion likely already have the possibility of Obamacare's failure baked into their stocks, but fundamentally it's not going to hurt the business model.