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Amazon's Push Into Healthcare Just Cost the Industry $30 Billion In Market Cap (qz.com)
Today, Amazon, along with Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan, announced a plan to launch an independent company that will offer healthcare services to the companies' employees at a lower cost. The venture, which will be managed by executives from the firms, will be run more like a non-profit, than a for-profit entity. Even though the plans are vague, the news caused the market value of 10 large, listed health insurance and pharmacy stocks to drop by a combined $30 billion in the first two hours of trading. Quartz reports: "The healthcare system is complex, and we enter into this challenge open-eyed about the degree of difficulty," said Amazon's Jeff Bezos in a statement. "Hard as it might be, reducing healthcare's burden on the economy while improving outcomes for employees and their families would be worth the effort. Success is going to require talented experts, a beginner's mind, and a long-term orientation." Warren Buffett, the CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, likened America's mushrooming healthcare costs to "a hungry tapeworm on the American economy." How the venture will provide less pricy healthcare to the 1.2 million employees of the participating companies isn't yet clear. The new company will leverage "technology solutions" that provide "simplified, high-quality and transparent healthcare at a reasonable cost." Not much else, including the name of the company, is known.
The NHS costs rather less than half the percentage of GDP that the US system does and produces better health outcomes, with 100% free coverage for citizens.
Nope. Obama failing to hold out for single payer and settling for Romneycare is what cost you. Countries with actual single payer systems spend half or less per capita with better outcomes for all.
Canada has a set of per-province plans that originally covered just major injury, then were upgraded to include proactive doctor visits. The doctors are private, the hospitals are typically from bond drives in the cities and the payments are collected by employers, separate from taxes.
Works reasonably well, and backstops low-cost benefits plans the employers offer, like dental and drug plans.
For example, as a kid my parents paid into the Ontario Hospital Insurance Plan, and dad campaigned door to door on a bond drive for the Chatham General Hospital. When I broke my heel, it got fixed in that same hospital, and OHIP paid for it.
davecb@spamcop.net
I am skeptical that Amazon et al will be successful in this, but I wish them well. If the politicians can't fix healthcare, many nerds can.
This has been done before, Kaiser about 80 years ago. They created their own medical care for on the job heavy construction site injuries, doctors with modern and sufficient equipment to stabilize the injured so they could be transported to a "big city" hospital. This quickly expanded to cover health care in general. Then it expanded to cover the worker's families too. And now we have a major non-profit healthcare provider covering the western US.
Speaking as a native Dutch person who recently moved to Germany, I call complete BS to this. Since they privatised the Dutch healthcare system it has completely gone downhill. Worse care, and skyrocketing costs with reduced coverage.
The German system is dual: with both private insurance and public. Not ideal, but at least it pretty much always functions, without the horrors of privatisation.
Site & blog: http://www.mayaposch.com
Top payers in medical care are not a mythical one percent. It's closet to universal 20/80 distribution. Weatlhiest people paying most into the system tend to also be healthiest, and vice versa.
This is something we tend to discover in countries with universal health care. Wealthy and healthy people get annoyed that they pay a lot of taxes, and they still have to sit five hours in ER queue with all the junkies and alcoholics. It's a real problem. So they end up paying extra on top of the high taxes paying for universal health care. And then they wonder why is it that they have to pay for public healthcare which they don't use.
Which provides them with incentives to vote for the parties that essentially push to defund public sector in favour of private one. Which is now the most popular party in my country, in some part due to this. It's a genuine problem in long term, and your denials of this will create problem on your end, because while you can refuse to address reality, you cannot refuse to address consequences of your denial of reality.
That is why your desperate attempt to build a caricature out of my arguments so you can easily debunk them is not constructive. You're the one who needs to win hearts and minds to get universal healthcare to pass in US. I already have it and I wholeheartedly support it for US, so strawmanning my points on the negatives of the system will not convince anyone who isn't already on your side, and will most certainly alienate those that aren't, because they can actually read my points, and see that you're not actually addressing them.
And by the way. US is not a "private only" system. Emergency care is still universal. Child healthcare is still universal. Elderly care is still universal.