Last week, former Congressman and current Senate candidate John Hostettler tweaked Evan Bayh by sarcastically predicting that Bayh wouldn’t vote for ObamaCare because it would endanger his wife’s access to lucrative stock options as a member of the board of directors of health insurance giant WellPoint.

Well, Hostettler was wrong and he was right. He was wrong in that Bayh did very much vote for the ObamaCare legislation. But Hostettler was correct in that Bayh was not going to let his family’s finances suffer from the passage of ObamaCare.

What Hostettler didn’t count on was that the legislation itself–damaging as it might be to Indiana’s state finances, as much as it might expand government, as much as it allows Federal tax dollars to fund abortions, and for all of its other myriad faults–still contained benefits for WellPoint and thus for the Bayh family.

Evan Bayh didn’t need to worry about voting against his family when he voted for the bill. Bayh didn’t get anything for Hoosiers in the sell-out-a-thon that came in the mad rush to get this abomination passed, but some things ended up in the bill that benefit WellPoint and thus the Bayh family’s finances.

Evan Bayh has his priorities, after all, and it’s pretty clear that big insurers like WellPoint (and his family’s bank account) are way up there on that priority list. Ordinary Hoosiers, not so much.

As lefty blog FiveThirtyEight notes, the greatest benefit to health insurance companies comes from the insurance mandate contained within the legislation. Everybody must now buy insurance, and the legislation provides $400 billion in subsidies to private insurers to help make that happen. It also expands the customer base for companies like Wellpoint by almost ten percent.

Over the course of the next ten years, the Senate’s bill directs about $447 billion in public subsidies to people for the purchase of private health insurance. (This is in addition to another $400 billion or so in subsidies for the expansion of Medicaid).

Another way to look at this is that the Senate’s bill will add about 17 million nonelderly members to the private insurance companies’ enrollment relative to the baseline case, according to the CBO. As about 177 million nonelderly Americans currently have private insurance, this represents a 9.6 percent increase in their customer base.

WellPoint, as one of the largest insurers in America, is going to get a big slice of that $400 billion pie. It’s also going to see its customer base swell by around ten percent as many people who don’t currently have insurance (for whatever reason) are forced to buy it from companies like WellPoint.

Read more after the leap.

It’s hardly surprising, therefore, that WellPoint stock closed on Monday at a near 52-week high. That’s right where Susan Bayh would want it to be if she wanted to exercise some of those stock options as a nice Christmas present.

Democrats howled for years that the Medicare prescription drug benefit was a huge payoff to big pharmaceutical companies. By such simple reasoning, ObamaCare represents a huge payoff to big insurance companies like WellPoint. Moreover, the legislation contains a series of measures that will benefit large insurance firms such as WellPoint over their smaller competitors.

From the Wall Street Journal:

Still, the latest version in the Senate contained some bright spots for insurers, at least compared to potential provisions discussed that required insurers to spend 90% of premiums on health care. This weekend’s version set the minimum medical-loss ratio at 85% for large-company coverage and 80% for small group and individual businesses.

“I think 85% for large group is not a problem; that’s where they are anyway,” said Mr. Borsch, the Goldman Sachs analyst. “Companies are going to have to change their business model to operate in the individual market at 80%,” he said, citing commissions for brokers that might have to get cut.

In other words, some of the mandates set by the bill create competitive advantages for big insurers like WellPoint (on whose board of directors Susan Bayh sits) while deliberately placing smaller insurers at a competitive disadvantage.

WellPoint isn’t going to have to trim its profits or alter its business model much to meet this 85% requirement. Its smaller competitors, however, are going to have problems meeting their requirements. Advantage: WellPoint.

The sad fact is that, under Obama, the Federal government is now in the business of picking winners and losers. Evan Bayh didn’t get anything for Hoosiers in this legislation. He did get something for himself, though.

He made sure that companies like WellPoint were picked by the Federal government to be winners.