Slashdot Mirror
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 UK's system is widely recognised as the most efficient, so the basic model - of single payer contracting with controlled hospitals - has a lot of efficiencies to offer in the American context. In the light of the news that the arrival of an Amazon distribution centre LOWERS the wages of warehouse workers, perhaps we will see this happen to doctors...
https://www.economist.com/news...
I do IT for a small grocery store chain and we went self insured a few years back now and we've saved a ton of money doing it.
I ignore Anonymous Coward posts. If you want to discuss something, that's awesome. Log in.
Although with how Amazon works if they can make it work for their employees you can bet there will be public offerings as well.
Indeed. AWS started as an internal service. Today, Amazon is primarily a Cloud Provider, that just happens to do online retailing on the side. AWS makes 3 times the profit of their retail operations.
And that would be capitalism. The FUD campaign waged by medallion cab drivers against Big Bad Uber is a child's sandbox fight compared to Amazon going up against America's most monopolistic industry.
Apart from a charge for each prescription of about $12, there are NO other copayments for most conditions. There are charges for dental and optician care, but that's pretty much it. It's not perfect; there are queues and delays, but in terms of bang for your buck, it's massively better than the US system.
health care. You can't have a for profit system built around something complex, expensive and life or death. Because people can just keep raising the price and you'll pay it or you'll die. Hell, our for profit system of agriculture only barely works with a _lot_ of government interference and subsidies and even then it relies heavily on borderline slave labor. This is why America spends more and gets worse outcomes to take care of less people. It's also why it costs $32k to give birth here and we still have the highest maternal mortality rates in the developed world.
Anyway, Single Payer Now. Medicare for All.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
The fed is trying to cool the economy down. If it heats up to fast because of a tax cut there is zero the fed can do yo recover except for negative interest rates. All other tools have been expended.
The good news is that Europe is growing faster, and Trump's anti imigrantion stance kills manufacturing and farming, so that should drag down the economy.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
Profit != income. I'm like, wtf is this guy talking about? Does he think everyone working at a nonprofit is volunteering with no salary? Surely, he's not that dumb. People become doctors for several reasons. It could be for money and prestige, it could be to fucking help people, like firemen and cops aren't in it for the money. I know several of both kinds of doctors.
I find this argument hilarious given Democrats had both Congress and the Presidency and when it was passed nobody said anything about keeping costs down.
It's only hilarious because the Democrats let the Republicans have a seat at the table. So how come the Republicans couldn't repeal it with both houses and the presidency?
Health care is the Gordian Knot of US economy and society. The left struggles to involve the government selectively in order to bend the cost-curve downwards. And the right tries to fix the problem by opening up the private sector. Obamacare was a herculean attempt to join those two propositions, and it just made it past the post, with the barely-required 60 votes in the senate. Republicans discovered that moving in the other direction was just as difficult, and failed repeatedly to change anything. (Except for repealing the individual mandate, which amounts to sabotage rather than reform.)
Meanwhile, all other industrialized nations have realized what the US may never realize: you need a national health-care plan to ensure that everyone gets care at a reasonable cost. The left would love to see that happen. The right sees it as fire-breathing Marxism, and fights with all it has to keep it from happening.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
My buddies an I often sit in front of the fire and solve the worlds problems. Healthcare is one of my favorites. We like to look at what exactly causes the high costs and address them one at a time... (Completely ignoring things that work or don't in other countries, because those are saved for discussions like "what works and doesn't in other countries") Here are some of our ideas relating to healthcare.....
Tax rebates for high cost medical equipment. This addresses the high costs of medical equipment at least a little, and helps maintain profitability in creation/manufacture/research of said tech.
Transparent pricing, no hidden fees, like every damn thing else traded for American dollars. That $.03 asprin is only $25.00 because you can't just say "no thanks, I can't afford that today.", so the market will bear any price. If it's painful, good, get your shit together healthcare. It's damn sad that I can check the costs of airfare across nearly an entire industry run mostly by brain-dead customer service people (which is also bogged down with massive regulation hoops and legal liabilities) in two minutes, but an industry run by over-schooled and highly paid professionals who are often smarter than I am can't seem to write a complete legible sentence or count past $100.00 without the insurance mans help.
Free government funded tuition for in demand medical field studies, paid for by taxes paid on medical practitioners earnings. (much like the industrial taxes I pay now pretend to cover industrial overhead) This addresses the licensed doctor shortages... For profit schools will love this shit, and the socialized education camp gets a win. Free doctor/nurse/med-tech/ect... training!
Immunity to malpractice accusations and court nonsense on all non-trivial procedures. People are going to die under the knife. You can choose to just die, or ask for help. With transparent pricing and lower overall prices, it's on the consumer to do their research when seeking a "family doctor". This all but eliminates the insurance against insurance bullshit driving costs through the roof. Personal responsibility time folks. Buyer beware. I know a LOT of people that travel to other countries to have medical procedures done and take a vacation while there- for half the price of half the care in America. They do their research before they buy a ticket. Seems to work.
State level cooperatives negotiating pharma prices, which are allowed to shop outside of the country. This addresses 500% increase games on life-saving drugs due to the captive market, and ends the market for smuggling life saving drugs that is fueling organized crime. This is so fucked up by the way... and also leads to the next one....
University and government funded research CAN NOT BE PRIVATE. Breakthroughs and moonshots in the medical field should be shared if funded on the public dime, and works and studies encouraged. Patents never granted on medicines derived from government (citizen) funded research. I've never understood how breakthroughs achieved and sciences explained/attained at state universities is not public by default. Who in the hell came up with the current system and how can they sleep at night?
I'm just another nerd pissed off about 15k emergency room visits and $30000 stillborns. I have no idea how these things would pan out, but nobody else ever seems to put forward any ideas addressing what seems to me to be the sources of the high costs of care that require the money sucking insurance companies to begin with. You gotta do more than creative accounting to fix this, and lives are at stake.
I imagine Amazon will drive costs down by sheer volume, access to data, simplicity, reliability, and scope of options. (Based on your shopping habits, you might also like.... a colonoscopy! available from these practitioners...)
The only thing more fun to discuss than American healthcare is American law enforcement. Hooo-boy do the tempers flare on that one.
You are being ripped off every second of every day, so that advertisers can help rip you off even more tomorrow.
Same in Switzerland. We were promised a more efficient healthcare system if it was run by competing insurance companies rather than the inefficient government.
Since then, cost has skyrocketed. More often than not, premiums went up 5-10% when salaries increased 0-2% tops.
The worst of all is that the premiums are not income-dependent and insurance is mandatory per person. In 2018, I pay for my family with 2 kids around USD 800 per month with the highest possible deductible (USD 3000/year and person). All that with a salary of around 6K USD (I'd pay the same if I got 20K...as I said, the premiums are not progressive).
On top of that, cost of medication went also through the roof and is often 2x as high as prices for the same medication in neighboring countries. Obviously, big pharma has our dear congressman in their deep pockets.
Politics & capitalism at its best.
Amazon.com looked at their bottom line, and they saw one very large expenditure that they had zero control over, and no ability to optimize. What do you think that was?
Employee healthcare costs!
Now, I recently had to get an albuterol inhaler. Albuterol is cheap, it was created in 1966. But inhalers, where they put a tiny bit of albuterol into an aerosol spray run like $65 after insurance contracted discount. That is INSANE!!!!
I'd be surprised if those inhalers cost more than a $1 to manufacture. So imagine, AmazonBasicsHealth offering a similar inhaler for $4. This monstrous price hike is extremely common. CPAPS are basically over-glorified aquarium air pumps. Yet, they cost around $2,000. And many who have utilized, will attest to the fact that the designs are often poorly thought out and build quality lacking. But hey, that plastic tubing is FDA approved, so you get billed $20-$80 for a hose that probably cost 79 cents.
So Amazon looking at this, can easily be like,....well we don't need to make a profit. Because, if we simply sell RX and services at cost, we can reduce our employee overhead by around 10%-15%. For Amazon, a 15% reduction of employee costs is a huge profit margin increase. And Amazon.com is big enough, that once they get it on the ball, can be very disruptive. They can go, and say to a manufacturer, we want a good CPAP for $500. If they don't relent. They design and build their own, and then sell it for $200. The companies will either have to come to the table or face eradication.
But the big thing is services....the doctors and nurses themselves. I've thought that the solution to this problem is to actually fund free medical school - with the catch being that half of a doctors time for the first 20 years or so is obligated back to either the company or community.