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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 30 2018, @09:40PM (8 children)
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".
Nobody does ANYTHING unless it's profitable.
Money is just one way to measure profit.
Capitalism embraces the notion that profit is in the eye of the beholder; two parties need to agree to make a trade.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Azuma Hazuki on Tuesday January 30 2018, @10:35PM (7 children)
We've been over this before, O Sultan of the Peoples' Republic of Dumbfuckistan: money, power, and privilege accumulate to one another, exponentially. Your no-rules utopia has no one to enforce contracts and no one to see that things remain voluntarily. Within weeks, if not days, it'd be a hellhole that makes Somalia look like mythological descriptions of Atlantis.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 30 2018, @11:09PM (6 children)
Who are arguing with? Certainly not the AC to which you replied, who never argued in favor of "no rules".
Enforcing a contract is a service; there's nothing magical about a government—there's no reason that the service provider must be a culturally revered monopoly imposed by coercion rather than agreement.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 30 2018, @11:59PM (5 children)
What happened to you as a child? Did CPS take you away? Maybe you're Ayn Rand's secret love child with Donald Trump? How does someone like you come to exist!?
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Wednesday January 31 2018, @03:49AM
Well, when a lot of damned souls in Hell hate each other very much, and the fabric of spacetime is somewhat weak, they can rip the fabric of the Calabi-Yau manifold a bit and leak into our plane.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 31 2018, @04:21AM (3 children)
...and, once again, it's worth mentioning to the Randians that Ayn Rand spent her last years in poverty, on Social Security and Medicare.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 31 2018, @02:10PM
That doesn't justify Social Security or governmental subsidy; that proves "self-interest".
Besides, if true (I know nothing about her), Ayn Rand undoubtedly payed into those programs, so why shouldn't she have been able to take from them? Certainly, having contributed much to the global dialog, she deserved any such resources far more than many of the resources squanderers on the dole.
(Score: 2) by captain normal on Wednesday January 31 2018, @07:46PM (1 child)
At least she had guaranteed basic income and single payer health insurance. The only question is, why did she have manage to survive to 65 to get them?
When life isn't going right, go left.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 01 2018, @12:21AM
Those "social" programs were designed to be systems that essentially forced people to save for their retirement: You pay into it throughout your productive youth, and then you get that money back in your dotage; perhaps, too, with a little means testing, it's possible manage risk throughout life, and thereby make those programs a kind of national insurance plan.
Of course, it didn't work out.
Wherever there is a pile of money, the vote-buying politicians connive to plunder it, and plunder it they did.