WellPoint to buy CareMore Health Group for about $800 million

The deal, which is expected to be announced Wednesday morning, would add to WellPoint's already dominant position in California, Arizona and Nevada.

By Gad Allon: By Martin Lariviere

By Ron Sommer: Over the course of the past year, we have written several articles focusing on the effect healthcare reform is having on the health insurance sector. Our articles have primarily been about Humana (HUM) and Amerigroup (AGP).

By Fountainhead:Cigna (CI), like its peers United Healthcare (UNH), Aetna (AET) and Well Point (WLP) hopes to grow its business out of its cyclical rut by jumping on to the managed Medicare bandwagon.

Fierce Healthcare -- "With retail clinics increasing ten-fold, more health systems and hospitals are capitalizing on the trend and getting in on the retail movement.

Jon Cohn spent part of Saturday wandering through the patches of protesters on Capitol Hill. What surprised him, however, was that the protests seemed less about health-care reform than about redistribution itself. To the protesters, Jon says, health-care reform is "about having their money taken for the sake of somebody else's security. When they hear stories of people left bankrupt or sick because of uninsurance, they are more likely to see a lack of personal responsibility and virtue than a lack of good fortune."

Third-quarter earnings at health insurer WellPoint fell 7.6% to $683.2 million. Executives blame the drop partly on higher expenses from the CareMore purchase.