ETF NEWS: HEALTHY HEALTHSHARES

One sector of the market I am really excited about is health care. The demographics of an aging population alone are reason enough to be bullish on health care stocks over the next decade. However, you don’t have to stick with investing in the old, boring stocks of big pharmaceutical companies.

Thanks to a new ETF provider on the scene called HealthShares, you now can narrow the focus of your health care sector investing and thereby hone in on the hottest sub-sectors of the overall trend toward greater health care spending.

At the recent Las Vegas Money Show, I spoke with representatives from HealthShares about their company’s new ETF offerings. These guys offer an impressive array of health care ETFs that specialize in things such as cardio devices, testing and diagnostic equipment and various other specialized medical fields. Below is a list of the 17 HealthShares ETFs currently available.

This list of tightly focused ETFs is by no means complete. In fact, the very smart people over at HealthShares have plans to expand their offerings at a very rapid rate — meaning that there likely will be many more new health care ETFs on the market very soon.

In my opinion, we are at the very cusp of a huge bull market in health care. Let me quote from the HealthShares Web site regarding one reason why this sector is going to be so huge.

"A short 25 years ago, health care was only 6% of the nation’s gross domestic product (GDP). Today, U.S. health care is a $2 trillion industry, representing 17% of the country’s GDP — the sector’s highest proportion of U.S. GDP ever. The nation’s health care bill has grown substantially by almost three times the overall national inflation rate to increase by 7.9 percent in 2004, the most recent year with near-final numbers. The overall cost of health care — everything from hospital and doctor bills to the cost of pharmaceuticals, medical equipment, insurance and nursing home and home-health care — doubled from 1993 to 2004. U.S. government economists are projecting that spending on health care will reach $4 trillion — or 20% of GDP — by 2015. The exploding cost of health care may be the single greatest economic challenge facing our country."

I totally agree with this analysis, and it’s just one reason why I like health care and the HealthShares funds.

If you are interested in finding out more about what HealthShares has to offer, I invite you to go to the company’s Web site.