Amazon, JP Morgan, and Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway are launching an independent healthcare company for their US employees.
The business giants announced the plan on Tuesday in a joint statement where Buffett described their shared desire to tackle the ‘hungry tapeworm’ of current US healthcare models.
According to Daily Mail, it will begin with their own employees – close to one million in the US – but the trio has clear hopes for the model to eventually be available to the entire country.
‘Our goal is to create solutions that benefit our US employees, their families and, potentially, all Americans,’ Jamie Dimon, the President, and CEO of JPMorgan Chase said.
Few additional details have been released but Buffett, whose holding company is Berkshire Hathaway, said their solution aimed to make healthcare more affordable for their workers.
The joint venture sees the titans of three industries – investments, online retail, and banking – tackle the issue of healthcare with unprecedented resources and in times of increasing legislative uncertainty.
All three were strong proponents of President Obama’s public healthcare program, dubbed Obamacare, before uniting to create an exclusive private provider system.
Buffett, 87, said the initiative will not solve all of the current problems with current models but hoped the venture would simplify healthcare plans.
‘The ballooning costs of (health care) act as a hungry tapeworm on the American economy. Our group does not come to this problem with answers. But we also do not accept it as inevitable,’ he said in a prepared statement which was released on Berkshire Hathaway’s Business Wire.
‘Rather, we share the belief that putting our collective resources behind the country’s best talent can, in time, check the rise in health costs while concurrently enhancing patient satisfaction and outcomes.’
The new company will be independent and ‘free from profit-making incentives and constraints’.
and then