One’s gut instinct might be to assume that anything bad for the amoral health-insurance racket is good for consumers, but in this case, it seems like everybody—with the notable exception of the young, the rich, and especially the young rich—might lose.

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House panel one step closer to vanquishing Consumer Financial Protection Bureau

Voting to repeal Obamacare was hardly the only fun thing that happened today on Capitol Hill, where the House Financial Services Committee voted 34 to 26 to repeal and replace Dodd-Frank with the Financial Choice Act. (Republicans love choice.) The bill is the brainchild of committee chairman Jeb Hensarling, who thinks, among other things, that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which was born out of Dodd-Frank and does things like go after predatory lenders, acts like a “dictator.” Not surprisingly, the Financial Choice Act gives Congress control of the C.F.P.B.’s budget, which it could take down to a much less dictatorial $0. Additionally, CNN Money reports, the bill would “create an alternative path for banks to bypass a number of . . . tough restrictions under the law, if they meet a certain measure of bank capital” and give the president the power to fire the heads of the C.F.P.B. and the Federal Housing Finance Agency “at any time for any—or no—reason at all.”

But please, don’t look at this like some sort of attempt on Republicans’ parts to deregulate the industry. According to Representative French Hill, that notion could not be further from the truth. The Financial Choice Act is “not about deregulation, but about rightsizing regulation,” he said Thursday. “Rightsizing,” for those of you not up on your corporate lingo, is the euphemism companies use when they talk about firing large swaths of employees, because it’s less aggressive sounding than “We just told hundreds of people to hit the bricks.”

Flying potbellied pig private, marrying his cousin not the most shocking part of hedge-fund manager’s story

There are many remarkable things about Boston-based hedge fund manager Nick Adams. He owns a miniature potbellied pig named Mona Lisa who lives with him at the Ritz-Carlton and, according to The Wall Street Journal, “walks outdoors on a leash and [goes] with him on private jet flights.” Adams was once married to a woman he wasn’t related to by blood but, also according to the Journal, he later divorced her and married his first cousin. Those two biographical factoids, though, are not why Adams is the subject of a lengthy profile today by reporters Rob Copeland and Peter Rudegeair. The actual reason is because the Wellington Management Company star recently set tongues wagging for doing something wholly antithetical to unspoken rules of the hedge-fund industry: he lost money and—wait for it— is “admitting mistakes and apologizing.” Here’s Copeland and Rudegeair on the whole shocking affair: