Health Care Effect: Weekend Reading

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- Good Sunday afternoon and welcome to another edition of Weekend Reading. First a look back at the week that just finished, then a look forward to the week ahead, and, lastly, a summary of articles and papers worth reading.

It was shakier week for the major markets, but they still registered gains. The S&P 500 was up 0.9% for the week, the Dow gained 1.1% and the Nasdaq added 0.3%.

There will be two major forces at work next week amid all the usual debt worries. First, we have Sunday's expected vote on health care reform. While it looks like it will go the Democrats' way, it could still get stuck. Even if it does pass, it will not be the end of uncertainty for this long-suffering piece of reform legislation.

Second, the pace of earnings improvement is slowing, because the year-over-year comparables are getting less easy. This looks like it will make further gains for the market much tougher from here.

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Turning to economic indicators, next week will bring reports on February existing-home sales and new-home sales. Late in the week we will see the final fourth-quarter gross domestic product number, plus a reading on March consumer sentiment.

As for earnings, we will see quarterly reports from Oracle(ORCL), William-Sonoma(WSM), KB Home(KBH), Adobe(ADBE), Walgreen(WAG), General Mills(GIS) and Best Buy(BBY).