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Amazon Health-Care Move May Be Next 'Home Run' Like Cloud Services
Amazon.com Inc.'s foray into health care won't be the first time it has disrupted an entire industry by starting with an effort inside the company.
Amazon Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos is teaming up with fellow billionaires Warren Buffett and Jamie Dimon to revamp health care for the 2.4 million workers and dependents of the companies they run. The move fostered widespread speculation the trio will eventually make their approach to medical care available to companies far and wide.
Bezos has a long, increasingly successful, record of starting new businesses on a small scale, often for the benefit of his company, then spreading them to the masses -- creating a world of pain for incumbents. Consider the ways Amazon is changing industries as varied as product fulfillment, cloud computing and even the sale of cereals, fruits and vegetables.
This is just a cheap excuse to follow up on the machinations of the world's richest human:
Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, and JPMorgan Chase to Offer Their Own Health Care to U.S. Employees
(Score: 4, Insightful) by AlphaSnail on Thursday February 01 2018, @10:56AM (8 children)
Nobody wants to trust him, but... how the hell is the healthcare industry supposed to become streamlined reducing costs and redundancy without someone starting over from scratch? It's not coming from within the industry as is ever - nobody is really in charge of this mess its decades of compromises, mistakes, middlemen, drug company profiteering, legacy contracts, regulations that may or may not in all cases be necessary - who is going to sort all that out, find the waste and get people to stop participating in it with any authority? People are getting paid by this system and they aren't just going to own up to it and start applying at McDonalds, everyone is going to argue for their continued relevance and nobody can fix this unless that person were somehow in charge of the whole show since even from a transparency perspective we can't see what the real cost of anything is. If the Amazon machine can start their own system and get it running in house and export it and it can compete with the rest of the industry it can only be a good thing so either it fails and something is learned or we all get the benefit so I say good luck to them.
(Score: 2, Redundant) by bradley13 on Thursday February 01 2018, @01:07PM (5 children)
As long as any new health care provider is subject to all the same governmental regulations, they will have the same impossible cost-control problems. These, in the end, are driven by the crying need for life to be fair. Life isn't fair.
If you talk to someone who's a fan of government run health care, they are always fighting against a "two-class healthcare system". I have news for them: There will always be a two-class system. Warren Buffet can afford better health care than you can, and you can afford better health care than the homeless dude under the bridge. Life's a bitch; denying reality isn't going to change that.
Want the government to provide a minimum level of health care for the indigent? Fine, but do so separately from the insurance market used by ordinary folk. Trying to combine the two is a disaster.
Then let the health insurance market be an insurance market. If you have a pre-existing condition, you're going to have a problem. See "health care for the indigent" above - that's likely you, because you will never qualify for insurance.
Those people who want to take a gamble and go uninsured? Their privilege, but if they get sick or injured, they'll need to pay cash. Or see "health care for the indigent" above.
The vast majority of working people will have insurance policies. They can sign up for a long-term policy, just like people do for life insurance. Sign up while you're young and healthy, and the costs will be a tiny fraction of today's insane prices. These should be individual policies - not tied to the workplace - because they are for your individual health. If your employer wants to pay the premiums great, but it's still your policy.
FWIW, what I describe is pretty much what we had in Switzerland until about 20 years ago. Worked great. Then the progs got all up-in-arms about fairness, and we now have our own miniature version of Obamacare: a free market that isn't. My premiums doubled overnight at the time, and have gone up massively every year since. The health minister wrings his hands on TV - he just doesn't understand why prices don't magically sink, even as he keeps piling on more and more regulations to try and cancel out the effects of the last round of additional regulations.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 2) by opinionated_science on Thursday February 01 2018, @01:45PM (4 children)
it is impossible to have a free market for a product, that if not delivered, can have your pain or mortality used against you.
It is no accident, I have never met a poor physician in *any* country....
(Score: 3, Touché) by Justin Case on Thursday February 01 2018, @02:17PM (3 children)
You mean like food?
(Score: 2) by julian on Thursday February 01 2018, @04:47PM (1 child)
You think food is a free market? Ever heard of farm subsidies? Food stamps? Not to mention the fact that we've essentially reached post-scarcity with food; most people are threatened by an overabundance of calories rather than a lack of them.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Justin Case on Thursday February 01 2018, @05:07PM
Well I'm not an advocate of government interference in the food market, like what you describe, but then government gets its tentacles into everything so really there aren't any free markets in anything.
But I was pointing out that it is possible to buy food at less than your-money-or-your-life prices because:
* You are the one paying the cost, so you are motivated to shop around. This keeps prices down.
* You are the one making the choice, fully informed of the price at the time you choose.
* You have a choice of "food care providers". Not a one-size-fits-all heavily-regulated choice-eliminating "food insurance plan".
(Score: 2) by opinionated_science on Saturday February 03 2018, @03:43PM
food occurs naturally in this world and humans can feed themselves - usually.
Healthcare, not so much....
(Score: 2) by stretch611 on Thursday February 01 2018, @05:36PM (1 child)
I hate Amazon... It has become the Walmart of the online world.
However, I hope they succeed. I hope they completely destroy the insurance companies. I hope they streamline the process completely.
Of course, once they do, I hope others learn how to recreate the streamlined process and bring real competition and cost savings into the area.
Now with 5 covid vaccine shots/boosters altering my DNA :P
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 02 2018, @12:15AM
First, as super_bob notes down in the (meta)thread, this story is a dup.
...and not the only one today. 8-(
I hope they streamline the process
Wishful thinking, I'm afraid.
As isostatic notes just below us, this is a company store thing.
Where single-payer universal coverage for all would make it so that changing jobs would not incur a period of non-coverage (paper-shuffling period; enrollment windows; employee probation period with new employer), this thing will tend to bond a worker to an employer--probably even more tightly than other health insurance models.
This appears to be a return to Feudalism.
Now, if this thing was opened up the way that happened with Henry Kaiser's Kaiser-Permanente (mentioned in the previous story), -that- would be interesting.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]