Enhancing Your Investment Strategy with Congressional Data

No less an analyst than Sherlock Holmes may have said it best: “It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data.” 

The FiscalNote U.S. Legislation & Regulation data set replaces human guesswork with hard data. Offering 10 years of historical data on federal legislation and regulations, it provides critical information to assess market risks and opportunities stemming from public policy. 

FiscalNote's proprietary technology aggregates laws and regulations from Congress and Federal Agencies in real-time to help you determine and assess risk within your portfolio. The data set helps illuminate where Congress may focus their attention, and where specific congressional members may fall on any given issue. 

What can I discover in the data? 

Using data from within FiscalNote, it’s possible to learn more about which members of the current Congress are most interested in sponsoring and supporting legislation around key topics —  for example, healthcare: 

Focusing on the top 10 congressional members who have sponsored and supported healthcare legislation, Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick stands out — an “independent” who has registered and typically votes with the GOP caucus. A closer look at his voting record in the most recent Congress (via FiveThirtyEight), illustrates a more detailed picture, in which he has hewed very close to the Republican party line on many issues, but maintained his independence in supporting a wide range of healthcare-related bills. This might mark Fitzpatrick as a key congressional member on the GOP side to follow around healthcare and related issues. 

To examine healthcare from the legislative side, the data set enables users to identify and track key legislation that may have a significant impact on revenue. For example, Pennsylvania’s two senators, Bob Casey (D) and Pat Toomey (R), co-sponsored legislation in October 2020 to modernize Federal nursing home protections and to enhance care quality and transparency for nursing home residents and their families. The bill would create an advisory council on rankings for nursing facilities under Medicare and Medicaid. 

According to the American Health Care Association, 63 percent of nursing home residents rely on Medicaid for their care. As the largest payer of long-term services, Medicaid reimbursed 90 cents for each dollar of allowable costs on average. While a shortfall remains, consistent and reliable access to Medicaid funding is a core part of the bottom line for any corporation offering healthcare through nursing homes or assisted living facilities. 

How can I make the data actionable?

Through a legislative lens, identifying bills such as the nursing home legislation mentioned above can help assess potential risk. Such a bill could have a ripple effect on the performance of healthcare companies that provide primarily nursing care or assisted living services. 

Viewing the data through the lens of legislators, having information about those who sit on health-related committees in both the House and Senate provides a roadmap of which congressional members are most committed and influential in healthcare-related legislation. You can then pull out data on specific bills these congressional members are sponsoring in the current Congress, and gain a better understanding of what legislation is likely to come to a vote and pass around healthcare and related issues.  

FiscalNote is a global technology company that uses powerful machine learning to aggregate, structure, analyze, and report on legal and regulatory data globally. FiscalNote's patented technologies ingest and classify unstructured government data at the U.S. local, state, and federal level to provide organizations with political risk and opportunity insights across industries.