Any health care moves under a new president are likely to be piecemeal, said Aaron Vaughn, an analyst with Edward Jones in St. Louis. That would help insurers, such as UnitedHealth Group Inc., WellPoint Inc., and Humana Inc., whose shares have lost about half their value this year.

Insurers scaled back earnings expectations this year after inaccurately forecasting medical and drug costs. Their shares have also been hurt by the inability to predict the impact of changes proposed by the presidential candidates and Congress, Vaughn said. Confronted with the turmoil in financial markets, advocates of health-care change may have to wait, analysts said.

"It would be implausible for Congress to approve any type of sweeping health-care changes," said Dave Shove, an analyst with BMO Capital Markets in New York, in a note to clients. "While presidential candidates will continue to speak to their previously crafted, broad health-care platforms, we suspect that members of congressional finance committees are more than aware of the new budgetary challenges presented by the proposed financial bailout."

Shove reiterated his outperform rating on the managed-care industry.

While health-policy groups agree that the financial crisis may push health care down the political agenda, they also said that may only put off the inevitable.

'Crowded environment'

"Health care will have to compete in a much more crowded environment," said Drew Altman, president of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation of Menlo Park, Calif. "In a funny way, it takes elected officials off the hook that they produce something sweeping and gives the forces supporting more incremental steps more chance."

Republican presidential candidate John McCain, a senator from Arizona, advocates taxing employer-provided health benefits and giving people a tax credit to buy coverage. His Democratic opponent, Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, says he wants to expand government programs and subsidize private coverage to reduce the number of uninsured Americans, now at 45.7 million people.

Obama told NBC News yesterday that the bailout may force him to enact his health plan in phases rather than all at once. His economic policy chief, Jason Furman, said the credit crisis argues for Obama's plan.

Obama's stance

"Barack Obama believes that bringing down the cost of health care is essential to creating jobs and getting our economy moving again," Furman said in an e-mail. "The economic crisis we face only increases the importance of passing his health plan and putting it into place quickly."

Lowered expectations for political change won't remove the pressure for action, health policy groups said.

Employers are paying an average $12,680 for family coverage this year, including $3,354 deducted from workers' paychecks, according to a Kaiser report released Wednesday. Health insurance premiums have more than doubled in nine years, a period in which wages grew 34 percent and inflation rose 29 percent, the report said.

Health insurer Aetna Inc., based in Hartford, Conn., supports Obama's goal of universal coverage and McCain's aim to allow Americans who buy insurance directly to have the same tax treatment as those who purchase it through an employer.

Pressure won't ease

The pressure for change won't ease as the nation copes with a surge in chronic diseases in an aging population, said Aetna Chief Financial Officer Joe Zubretsky in a Sept. 17 interview.

"We need legislators and the private sector to address the wellness of Americans," he said. "We can actually reduce the number of health-care errors, decrease the level of health-care inefficiency and increase preventive types of procedures and protocols to stem the wave of chronic diseases."

The federal intervention in the credit crisis may make health-system changes even more dramatic when they do arrive, said Len Nichols, who heads the Washington, D.C.-based New America Foundation, a policy research group.

"We can't just do nothing without bearing the cost of doing nothing, which is high and rising," said Nichols, a former adviser to President Clinton. "If we just do what we're doing, we're just taxing ourselves at an increasing rate in terms of lost opportunities, while we cover fewer and fewer people every year."