Catch up on the weekend’s top five stories with this list compiled by The Fly:
1. The Trump administration halted billions of dollars in payments to health insurers under the Obamacare healthcare law, saying that a recent federal court ruling prevents the money from being disbursed, according to Reuters. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services said the action affects $10.4B in risk adjustment payments, the report added. Publicly traded companies in the space include Aetna (AET), Anthem (ANTM), Centene (CNC), Cigna (CI), Health Net (HNT), Humana (HUM), Molina Healthcare (MOH), UnitedHealth (UNH) and WellCare (WCG).
2. PayPal (PYPL) is ready to invest up to $3B a year on acquisitions that enable it to acquire specific capabilities, President and CEO Dan Schulman told Germany’s Handelsblatt business daily in an interview, according to Reuters. “We have a healthy balance sheet and we are ready to put it to work to buy more companies,” he added.
3. Shares of Royal Caribbean (RCL) have taken on water lately, as bears argue that too many ships will come on-line in the next few years, that a stronger dollar will hurt sales outside the U.S., that higher fuel prices will trim profits and that Caribbean bookings will be soft as a result of last year’s bad hurricane season, Lawrence Strauss wrote in this week’s edition of Barron’s. However, that decline and the worries about the industry seem overdone, he contended.
4. Disney (DIS) and Marvel’s “Ant-Man and the Wasp” easily topped the weekend, earning an estimated $76M in the North American box-office in its first outing. Overseas, the movie buzzed to $85M for a global start of $161M. The sequel earned an A- CinemaScore and sports an 86% Rotten Tomatoes score. 5. Intel (INTC), Marathon Petroleum (MPC), Michael Kors (KORS), Lockheed Martin (LMT) and Toll Brothers (TOL) saw positive mentions in Barron’s.
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