‘Health groups suffer as Amazon, Berkshire and JP Morgan team up,” proclaimed the front-page headline in Wednesday’s Financial Times. The report below the line revealed that the online giant had teamed up with Warren Buffett’s conglomerate, Berkshire Hathaway, and America’s biggest bank to create a not-for-profit healthcare group whose mission is to reduce the healthcare costs for their combined payroll of nearly a million employees.
Launching the initiative with his customary folksy bluntness, Buffett said that “the ballooning costs of healthcare 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.” If this – plus the fact that the new venture is to be a not-for-profit enterprise – was intended to be soothing, then it failed. The announcement immediately wiped billions off the valuations of the corporate tapeworms that have for decades fastened like leeches on the US healthcare system. And it’s not Buffett that scares them, but Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s chief executiveCEO and founder.
Continue reading...posted from The Guardian
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