PredictIt Plays of the Week: Healthcare Is Back, and the GOP House Will Be Too

A couple weeks ago, when The National Pulse began this PredictIt-centric column, I promised that the healthcare bill had no chance of passing the Senate by July 31: This contract specifically states that the Better Care Reconciliation Act — i.e. the Obamacare repeal and replace bill — has to pass the Senate by July 31 for it to resolve to YES. Everything I’ve read and heard from Capitol Hill indicates that the 50 votes needed to pass this through the Senate simply aren’t there. With NO shares at 89 cents currently, we’re looking at a 12.3 percent gain in just

Could This Backup Plan for Obamacare Repeal Save the Senate GOP?

After spending the last seven years promising the American people that they would repeal and replace Obamacare, GOP members of Congress are getting cold feet now that they actually have the opportunity to do it. All indications are that, as of this afternoon, the current Senate GOP bill lacks the votes to pass. In the meantime, two GOP senators and one former senator are preparing a backup plan if the bill doesn’t pass, in the form of a federalism-based bill that would largely put the states in charge of health care policy. The backup bill is being sponsored by Sens.

PredictIt Plays of the Week: No Obamacare Repeal, Thomas Next Justice Out?

Have you heard of PredictIt? PredictIt is a prediction market that attempts to “guess” the outcome to a number of political questions. For example, during the 2016 election, PredictIt had a market for “Will Donald Trump win the presidency?”. On PredictIt, you have the opportunity to buy YES shares and NO shares on any of these questions for anywhere between $0.01 and $0.99/share. When the question resolves to a YES, the YES shares will close at $1 and the NO shares will close at $0, and vice versa. This creates a market. When an event is perceived to be more