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Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan Team Up to Disrupt Health Care
Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan Chase announced on Tuesday that they would form an independent health care company to serve their employees in the United States. The three companies provided few details about the new entity, other than saying it would initially focus on technology to provide simplified, high-quality health care for their employees and their families, and at a reasonable cost. They said the initiative, which is in the early planning stages, would be a long-term effort "free from profit-making incentives and constraints."
The partnership brings together three of the country's most influential companies to try to improve a system that other companies have tried and failed to change: Amazon, the largest online retailer in the world; Berkshire Hathaway, the holding company led by the billionaire investor Warren E. Buffett; and JPMorgan Chase, the largest bank in the United States by assets.
Various health insurance and pharmacy companies were hit by the news:
The move sent shares of health-care stocks falling in early trading. Express Scripts Holding Co. and CVS Health Corp., which manage pharmacy benefits, slumped 6.7 percent and 5.5 percent, respectively. Health insurers Cigna Corp. and Anthem Inc. also dropped. The health-care industry has been nervously eyeing the prospect of competition from Amazon for months. While the new company created by Amazon, Berkshire and JPMorgan would be for their U.S. staff only, this is the first big move by Amazon into the industry. The new collaboration could pressure profits for middlemen in the U.S. health-care supply chain.
Related: $54 Billion Anthem-Cigna Health Insurer Merger Rejected by U.S. Judge
CVS Attempting $66 Billion Acquistion of Health Insurer Aetna
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Tuesday January 30 2018, @07:57PM (5 children)
Did not read link, but: research wasn't for profit at a past time: governments and universities did research and shared all findings at one time, reducing duplicate funding AND research (whether the research was Chinese, Russian American, Libyan..... research was shared world wide).
Now it is all for profit and research is duplicated and research is faked and side-affects are pooh-poohed and money is made while lives are lost and...
....profit!
Mankind suffers while personal profit gains with each life lost.
Sad.
Glad i live in Canada, not the US.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 30 2018, @08:09PM (4 children)
Nobody does anything unless it's profitable.
Otherwise, you'd be spending resources studying underwater basket-weaving.
If you want to see more money spent on a particular area of research, then maybe you should fight for more "private" control over the allocation of such money; it's hard to donate to such research when the government already spends that money locking people up for smoking a plant in the supposed privacy of their own homes.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 30 2018, @09:12PM
I see you've taken to using a new format, but you're still identifiable by your generally tenuous grasp of reality.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 30 2018, @09:14PM (2 children)
I guarantee you there are jobless bums who code open source software all day for zero profit. They don't get paid. They can't get paid. There's no money to be made in software because profitable private enterprise will not pay for software which can be outsourced for free to jobless bums.
You mock underwater basket-weaving; I submit to you: computer science is worthless.
Here in reality, computer science is the real underwater basket-weaving. Studying computer science is a sure guarantee of dying in poverty. Tech is a dead end field. You can thank private sector tech giants like Amazon for making it a dead end field.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 30 2018, @09:30PM
In no way did the other AC's argument depend on money.
Your problem is that you are confusing the word "profit" with "improved bank balance".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 30 2018, @09:35PM
You see? You're suggesting that the economy has produced signals alerting people that it's unprofitable to study computer science; if that's true, people will put their resources into studying other fields that seem to be more profitable.
Nobody does ANYTHING unless it's profitable. Capitalism embraces the notion that profit is in the eye of the beholder; two parties need to agree to make a trade.