Stock Market Today: Dow Jones, S&P Spikes As House Rescinds American Health Care Act

Major U.S. stock market indexes slipped Friday ahead of the House decision to discard the American Health Care Act, the GOP bill intended to replace former President Barack Obama’s 2010 Affordable Care Act, only to shoot upward when the news broke that Republicans in Congress had pulled the legislation.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJI), Standard & Poor’s 500 Index (GSPC) and Nasdaq Composite Index (IXIC) uniformly fell approximately 0.8 percent over the course of the trading day. Around 3:30 p.m., however, when reports surfaced that Congressional lawmakers would rescind the AHCA, all three indices immediately spiked, closing at 20,599.74, 2,344.21 and 5,828.74, respectively.

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The decline and subsequent upswing came three days after the stock market’s worst day in five months, during which the Dow dropped more than 1 percent, the S&P fell 1.2 percent and the Nasdaq Composite decreased nearly 2 percent.

Analysts largely attributed Tuesday's market slump to the likely delay in the AHCA’s passage, as it signaled a possible derailment of the potential rollout of Trump’s other pro-business objectives, such as a $1 trillion stimulus package and a substantial corporate tax reduction. But the equity market’s positive reaction to the House Republicans’ decision Friday afternoon revealed a possible inclination for the status quo.

Read: Dow, S&P Drop As Report Says Stocks Are Most Overvalued In 17 Years

Still, passage of the bill, known alternately as “Trumpcare,” “Ryancare” and “Obamacare Lite,” could’ve harbored negative consequences for the American economy.

A report released Friday by the Economic Policy Foundation, for example, found that all else equal, the AHCA could reduce job growth by just over 400,000 in 2019, over 1 million in 2020, 1.6 million in 2021 and nearly two million in 2022. If the 2017 bill had become law, according to a report from the Congressional Budget Office, 24 million Americans would have been left uninsured by 2026, while premiums would have likely risen by between 15 and 20 percent over the following two years.