Dear Mr. Berko: All the advertisers in the financial media claim to be wizards but either lie or brag only about their successes. Then when you get suckered into their spiels, those stories turn into losses. I’m given up subscribing to stock market investment services, listening to glib financial talk show hosts, attending financial seminars and buying financial magazines that brag about how they always beat the Standard & Poor’s averages. Everybody wants to sell a deal. But none of these liars is worth a darn except for one money manager — who won’t take us back, because my wife was too forceful in objecting to the 1 percent fee he had been charging since 2009. Could you persuade this person, who knows you, to take us back? If not, I want you to recommend low-cost, high-growth, high-rated mutual funds in which to invest $700,000 for the next 12 years that I won’t need to watch every week. Also, make sure that the mutual funds you recommend are all no-load mutuals.
— LS, Durham, N.C.
Dear LS: That whilom money manager told me your wife is an ogress, a harridan and a harpy. “I’ll consider taking him back on one condition,” he said. “LS has to divorce her, and then I’ll think about it.” I suspect that you already know this!
I would, with alacrity, invest $25,000 in Vanguard Health Care Fund (VGHCX-$208), $25,000 in BlackRock Health Sciences Opportunities Portfolio (SHSAX-$47), $25,000 in T. Rowe Price Health Sciences Fund (PRHSX-$67) and $25,000 in Fidelity Select Biotechnology Portfolio (FBIOX-$204).
Over the coming decades, Congress will be spending an increasingly larger amount of our tax dollars on health care. The health care lobby has borrowed the mantra of the defense lobby: “A vote to reduce defense spending is a vote against patriotism!” So any vote that reduces health care spending is considered a vote against the American family. Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon and Boeing have grown their earnings by over 400 percent in the past decade because they have the skills to overbill the government and because lobbyists paid Congress to approve spending bill after spending bill. And so it will be with medical supply stocks, medical appliance stocks, medical service issues, medical data issues, hospital equities and drug company stocks. Corporations such as UnitedHealthcare, Aetna, HCA Holdings, Merck & Co., Johnson & Johnson, Vertex Pharmaceuticals, Celgene, Amgen, Stryker, Cigna and Tennant will roll in newfound riches. There are many things I’m not sure about, but as sure as God made little green apples and the worms therein, health care spending will zoom. That’s the nature of all government-fed beasts, and after defense and Social Security, health care has become the untouchable third rail of politics.