Health care’s Three Amigos? The big names behind a new push

The three companies together employ more than a million people.

“[There was a recent] survey about this – specifically, millennials are the most interested in new health care offerings, but it wasn’t as much high-tech as it is convenience they are interested in – same-day appointments with a family doctor, guaranteed appointments with specialists, home visits, a wider array of services available at retail clinics”.

The company will add its 500,000 employees to the new health care network. Is this just the start of Amazon disrupting how insurance is provided?

Berkshire Hathaway, Amazon, and JP Morgan Chase are all partnering on a nonprofit healthcare venture for their employees.

Not only will the three companies be able to utilize their own services to ultimately make a profit, they will in fact be reducing their own costs.

Kaiser Health News (KHN) is a national health policy news service. They did not elaborate on their strategy, but said they are searching for a chief executive officer.

Amazon announced Tuesday that it will join with J.P. Morgan Chase and Berkshire Hathaway to wade into the jungle of USA health care, and the news slashed billions in stock-market value from health-care companies in mere hours. The companies outlined few concrete steps in their announcement, and making big changes to the entrenched, inefficient U.S. health system will likely prove more complicated than Mr Jeff Bezos and Mr Warren Buffett imagine, some health experts say. He sees Amazon’s and Berkshire’s health care focus as yielding greater opportunities for early stage companies that offer cost-saving alternatives to current practices, Gatto said.

“Our group does not come to this problem with answers”, Buffet said.

Rising bond yield continued to weigh on United States stocks on Tuesday, pushing the Dow Jones Industrial Average down more than 250 points, with pressure also being piled on by a drop in health companies.

The most recent example is Amazon’s collaboration with Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan, which spurred selling in healthcare stocks, but it’s a dynamic that’s happened repeatedly in recent months. The three companies, with a combined market cap of $1.62 trillion, did not provide details of how the collaboration between their CEOs came about.

For blue-collar workers, the brutality is even more straightforward: In 2011, Amazon stationed paramedics and ambulances outside its factory in Allentown, Pennsylvania, to cart off workers as they collapsed in the 102-degree heat. While the industry’s landscape includes numerous insurers, there still aren’t enough of them in enough geographical markets to provide meaningful competition. Just possibly, it’s a partnership that could disrupt the USA health-care system – in a good way. “Having a more nuanced and data-based view of candidates opens up more possibilities, allowing companies to make better decisions and support the leaders they hire, as well as providing input on which natural qualities they could tap into to drive performance or change”. Cantor Fitzgerald health services analyst Steven Halper says the announcement has “more bark than bite at this point”.

Some benefits insiders, however, express doubts that the three behemoths will spur a widespread industry disruption. It’s not just about selling drugs, however.

Gatto, CEO of health care investment fund Jumpstart Foundry, said the slow pace at which the health care sector has addressed its challenges and innovated has been worrisome. But we pay a heck of a lot more. And at the root of it all is our for-profit health system. It’s not (yet) a marketable product. “Rather, we share the belief that putting our collective resources behind the country’s best talent can, in time, check the rise in health costs while concurrently enhancing patient satisfaction and outcomes”. But that might not matter.

One has to applaud the initiative if you are outside the health care sector and fear it if you are inside.

Redirect Health, a pioneer in health plan redesign and cost redirection, offers small and midsized businesses across the country a similar healthcare model focused on eliminating waste, administration and unnecessary costs rampant in today’s healthcare system.