Obamacare-Proofing Your Portfolio

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- Whether you like it or hate it, the Affordable Care Act is constitutional, so maybe it's time to adjust your portfolio to this reality.

Having covered the medical beat while the bill was under debate, I can offer you a quick take:

Buy insurers, especially UnitedHealth(UNH) . Insurers are the biggest winners here. Margins may be under pressure, but more customers mean more money to play with.
UnitedHealth is the first one to look at because it has the most investments in health IT, through what is now called Optum, combining the former Ingenix unit with Connextions, a health IT consultancy acquired last year.
Data is considered a key to lowering the per-patient cost of care, using electronic health records to bring best practices to physicians and hospitals. The sector got a $19.2 billion boost in the 2009 stimulus, and those who don't take the cash will start being hurt in reimbursements by 2015.
UNH shares fell sharply yesterday, after the Supreme Court ruling, but actually closed higher as the smart money came in.

Buy pharmacists, especially Walgreens(WAG) and CVS Caremark(CVS) . There will not be enough first-line doctors to deliver the first-line care called for in the law, and the pharmacists have been gearing up for years with networks of in-store clinics staffed by nurse practitioners and physicians assistants, backed by IT resources and with doctors in the background.
CVS has its MinuteClinic chain, while Walgreens' in-store clinics are called Take Care. Walgreen's is redesigning stores to put a host of health-and-lifestyle services in front of customers while they wait for prescriptions to be filled. CVS stores are more traditional, but the company also owns a pharmacy benefit manager to assure traffic. Walgreen's famously split from the leading PBM, ExpressScripts(ESRX) last year.

Consider hospitals as takeover candidates. The most efficient medical systems, like Intermountain Health and Kaiser, are vertically integrated. That is, insurance is tied to facilities, and the whole group thus has a financial incentive to deliver best practices and lower per-patient costs.
This has been true for over a decade, but it now becomes the key to financial success across the industry.