That, perhaps, explains Berkshire Hathaway’s additions to its holdings of UnitedHealth and Wellpoint during the first quarter of this year, as both companies’ stocks fell sharply.

Berkshire Hathaway bought 300,000 shares of WellPoint and 400,000 shares of UnitedHealth, according to this SEC filing from yesterday.

“If a stock goes down 50 percent it doesn’t bother me in the least,” Buffett said earlier this month, Bloomberg notes “If we’re going to be buying things, we want to buy them on sale.”

Of course, if it was simply a matter of increasing holdings that are falling, we’d all be billionaires. There must be more to it than that. Case in point: Berkshire’s holdings in GlaxoSmithKline didn’t change during the first quarter, despite the fact that the stock price fell sharply. Back to the drawing board.

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Obama and rival Hillary Clinton are both pushing universal health-care plans that would expand government’s responsibility while also keeping a role for private insurance. McCain wants to shift health insurance tax breaks from employer-sponsored insurance to individuals and families, who could apply a tax credit to insurance they buy on an open, less-regulated market.

McCain’s also alluded to taking steps to make it easier for the sick to get coverage in that market. (See more here on how both sides are making compromises that make their plans more centrist.)

Campaigning in Oregon this past weekend, Obama said not so fast on the Republican’s plan. McCain, Obama said, “wants to give you the failed Bush health-care policies for another four years,” according to the Chicago Tribune. And what has Bush done on health care? Nothing, Obama said, “except offer a few tax breaks to some folks who don’t really need them.”

Obama added that McCain would “shred” employer-based health care and leave every American to “fend for yourself” in the free market, according to the Tribune.

A McCain spokesman responded that Obama and Clinton “want to insert government bureaucracy into your medicine cabinet, while John McCain is committed to keeping America’s top-quality doctors, and reforming the system so that health-care plans would be made available, accessible and affordable for families.”

Health Blog McCain Bonus: In an opinion piece in the Dallas Morning News, Jonathan Cohn questions whether the sick would be able to get coverage under McCain’s plan, even if provisions are enacted to try to make it easier. The problem remains that insurers “generally won’t offer coverage directly to people with ‘pre-existing conditions,’ since they represent such bad financial risks.”

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On a tour, Google explains that, yes, this is another “personal health record,” a way for patients to store and manage their medical information in one place. But Google seems to be trying to address one of the big problems with PHRs: maintaining them is a big pain.

“Of course you don’t want to type in your entire medical history yourself,” says Google, playing the soothing therapist. So the company has developed partnerships with a handful of health-care entities to lend a hand. For instance Walgreen said it would help patients access their pharmacy records through Google Health, and CVS Caremark said patients would be able to get to their prescription records as well as summaries from their visits to MinuteClinic. Lab-test company Quest Diagnostics is also participating, as are pharmacy-benefits giant Medco, the Cleveland Clinic and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, according to this list of partners. The group isn’t huge, but it’s a step.

The biggest hurdle of all may be that only 14% of medical practices keep records electronically, the WSJ noted earlier this year. The real moment for these services isn’t likely to come until larger numbers of docs finally shift to electronic records that can easily be transferred to personal health records.

WSJ’s Google reporter Jessica Vascellaro sent us a dispatch: “Google’s vice president of search products and user experience Marissa Mayer said the company is very conscious of the sensitivity of the information it is collecting and has taken a range of steps — including beefed up security of the servers where records are stored — to protect it. Consumers must also select which participating medical organizations can read and send updates to their profile and can tailor the permissions for different providers.”

Still, some worrywarts have pointed out that Google and Microsoft, which offers something called HealthVault, won’t be subject to the strictures of the federal health privacy law known as HIPAA.