Every weekday, the CNBC Investing Club with Jim Cramer releases the Homestretch — an actionable afternoon update, just in time for the last hour of trading on Wall Street. Stocks are lower Tuesday, with the S & P 500 down more than 0.5% and the tech-heavy Nasdaq dropping more than 1%, putting both indexes on track for a third straight losing session. The pullback comes after the S & P 500 closed at a record high last Thursday. AI-related stocks are feeling the brunt of the pain. Semiconductor stocks like Micron and Intel , component and materials names such as Corning and Qnity Electronics , and infrastructure buildout companies including GE Vernova and Eaton all fell between 5% and 8%. As AI names pulled back, enterprise software and our big pharma stocks jumped about 3%. While there was no specific fundamental catalyst for this rotation, climbing bond yields and oil prices may have spooked some traders out of momentum names. We added to our position in GE Vernova earlier Tuesday. Costco is embarking on another venture that takes the retail giant deeper into healthcare and could eventually make a warehouse membership even more appealing to shoppers. On Tuesday, the company and SCAN Group, a not-for-profit health insurer on the West Coast, announced a partnership to launch a Costco-branded Medicare Advantage plan. The forthcoming product, which is still working its way through the regulatory process, is planned to initially launch in two states, said Dr. Sachin Jain, the CEO of SCAN Group, in an interview. Jain said they’re also working on a Medigap plan — supplemental insurance to help cover out-of-pocket Medicare expenses, such as copays and coinsurance — that will be available in a third state. SCAN Group currently offers its own Medicare Advantage plan in counties across five states — California, Arizona, Nevada, Texas, New Mexico, and Washington — serving nearly 460,000 members. Costco became a preferred pharmacy for SCAN’s Medicare Advantage members last year, so Tuesday’s announcement builds on that relationship. “Being a not-for-profit provider of insurance services, our goal is to provide as much value as we can to the Medicare beneficiaries that we serve. You can understand the clear alignment between Costco and us in that regard,” said Jain, who added that he’s a longtime Costco shopper himself. Jain said SCAN Group believes health insurance is a “broken industry” in need of fixing, and working with Costco can help accomplish that. “Part of the work that we’re trying to do is really redesign the Medicare Advantage experience, and do it in the same way that Costco knows how to do it, which is an exquisite focus on member value.” Medicare Advantage is the privately run version of the U.S. government’s senior health insurance program, typically bundling together hospital, medical and prescription drug insurance, as well as extra benefits not available under so-called original Medicare. For many years, insurers such as Humana…
Read More: Costco sets its sights on a new kind of product: Medicare Advantage
