Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, JPMorgan Chase announce new health insurer 'free from profit-making incentives and constraints'

It’ll be a boon if they can control costs. It will go sideways if they can’t. The article I read stated they were looking for a way to band together to insure their 1.2 million workers and remove the idea that health insurance needs to be yet another capitalist endeavor to profit.

Why would wealthy people do this? Pure altruism? Ha!

Something else is at play. They want to improve their existing businesses, make those more profitable.

They see all this money going out the door to paying other companies to handle their employees’ health care needs… and they see premiums rising, employees getting worse health plans as the years roll on, ACA rollbacks in coverage, etc. They have no handle on costs. It’s all completely out of their hands, except for what they can negotiate to offer as that year’s plans.

But by self-insuring, they think they can create a situation where they can influence costs. Not just premiums. Maybe they are thinking about building clinics and hiring their own doctors. They have not yet said how deep into health care they are going to go, or if this is just an insurance ploy.

Let’s say they do manage to control costs. If they do, they can attract and keep more workers who will stay on longer, so less turnover. If they provide health care, maybe they can keep their employees healthier than other types of health care, so that’s an increase in productivity. Maybe they can use the leverage of their in-network services to lower costs in out-of-network services by absorbing more of them and bringing them into their network, like Amazon does with everything else.

Who knows?

It could be a win for employees. It could also become the worst kind of Kaiser-style HMO (remember all the HMOs that closed in the 1990’s?), with a shortage of resources, long drives to a few out of the way Amazon-JPMorgan-Berkshire clinics and hospitals, poor execution in critical areas like long term care, an over-emphasis on short term stuff and a quiet shuffling off of people who become so disabled they cannot work anymore. It could turn into just another fleecing of people in the system.

Too early to tell. in any event, it’s 1.2 million people. That is less than half a percent of the population, so let’s keep that in perspective.

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Making money off others misery, it’s so American!

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Buffet seems like - how can I put it? - one the least, er, malevolent billionaires that I’ve read about, at least. He has the decency to be upset that he pays a lower tax rate than his secretary, for example.

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Interesting, I use to live about a 20 minute drive from one, and then I moved and live about 20 minutes from another one. I’m no expert on office decoration but they do look like “this century”, although with more fish tanks then I like (I’m not fond of fish in a commercial setting), and far far more TVs looping a mix of self promotion and “how to do X in a healthy way” in waiting areas.

I’m not exactly thrilled by them, but they are way better then the other 3 insurers I’ve had. Specifically they have never told me to go to an ER and then after the fact told me they won’t cover it. They also haven’t told me my doctor charged “too much” for a procedure, but refused to find me someone charging their acceptable rate in (literally) a 100 mile radius. Both have happened to me at other insurers.

(P.S. they also apparently have a health center walking distance from my office, I’ve never used it though)

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Isn’t the problem that other companies can undercut by only insuring the healthy people?

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This brings up a very good point. How ethical is it to own the health insurance company that your potential employee will join, and somehow manage to find out during the interview how healthy they are before you hire them?

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Not very, but it is also unethical to make the same choice based on “that guy will raise our premiums with out 3rd party insurer” as well.

I’m less sure about “that guy seems like he will be out sick a lot and not be able to do the job in a timely manner”, I don’t know if you are allowed to do that. Likewise, I don’t know if you can say “oh, a smoker, might inconvently get cancer when we have a deadline”, or “screw it, we don’t have any smokers right now, if we hire them we will need to set up a smoking area, and have someone empty the ash tray…”.

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You’re right to be cynical (Bezos, too). This is all about improving their bottom lines. However, if Buffett is likening the current health insurance system to a “hungry tapeworm” he’s thinking the right way. These guys don’t like no-value-add parasites and middlemen and there are a lot of them as it stands.

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This isn’t innovative at all. Blue Cross started the same way, and there are many nonprofit health insurance companies today. I have worked for two.

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A friend of mine has been looking into independent insurance as a freelancer in Washington State. The best he can currently do is $1000+ a month premium with a $7000 deductible.

If Bezos and Buffett can improve things, I’m willing to try anything, really.

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Private sector socialism?

groan

What will they think of next…

AKA “the company store”.

This is not new.

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Agreed. Most new-school bullshit tends to be a rehash of old-timey bullshit, as far as I can tell.

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I think that’s the right attitude… I remember Astor and the NY Public Library. Sometimes it takes a rich guy, because we simply don’t have the governmental infrastructure in place to do the right thing for ourselves (i.e., the American citizenry). And, yes, Amazon’s attitude toward its employees is discouraging, but its attitude toward automation is rather encouraging.
I don’t believe we can afford a “fruit of the poisoned tree” approach, and simply reject out of hand anything done by anyone rich.

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They’re not going to cover any unemployed people, nor anyone they haven’t selected to be employed in the first place.

This isn’t going to improve a single thing for anyone, not even the employees who now get to fear losing a form of coverage that even if just equivalent tot he current system, is outside of it.

Nevermind if COBRA will apply. I would bet it will not.

A shit sandwich all around, even for those 1.2 million guinea pigs hostages.

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Sure, he certainly comes off as at least not entirely tone deaf to the problems of inequality. He still had not qualms about amassing such a vast fortune, even sometimes at the expense of the very poorest among us, living hard scrabbled lives:

There is a Zizek argument (or going back further, to good old Oscar Wilde) that charity is not much more than a means of propping up capitalism and making the person donating feel good about themselves. It’s propping up the brutality of the system in general. I think it’s in here?:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GRvRm19UKdA

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Because current health insurance models are unintentionally designed to maximize healthcare spending.

You know that insurers are capped at like 20% for how much they can spend on administrative stuff, like executive pay, right? So since they can’t take a larger piece of the pie, they do everything they can to make the pie bigger, so their 20% is a bigger chunk.

So your healthcare premiums spike up every year, way above inflation, as a side effect.

The other side effect is that we’re basically pouring napalm on the already-on-fire healthcare sector, which causes explosive growth and creates (temporary) jobs, causing a sort of bubble effect, because if and when the driving factor (exploding healthcare premiums) is reined in, there will be a huge crash and contraction in the market, with a lot of people competing for a lot fewer jobs, which will drive down wages as well as lead to a boom in unemployment.

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To understand this better, take the perspective of big biz for a sec. What does BigBiz want? Simple: $. When? Now and forever, but preferably now. How? Any means they have available.

Right now, big biz is subject to the whims of Aetna, Cigna, BCBS, United health, etc., because their employees have health insurance through these other companies. Their pricing & reimbursement negotiations with hospitals and doctors associations is completely dark to everyone else but the care providers and insurers.

Costs are out of control and BigBiz feels it. A huge amount of time and effort are wasted every year in their HR departments dealing with big insurance and employee issues around health care. A massive waste, and who is sucking it all up? Mainly these nuisance insurers who have a completely opaque price structure and rising costs every year. BigBiz is uncomfortable and seeks control. It will mean a blacker bottom line, instead of this annual leak to other companies.

Perfect storm for BigBiz to get pissed off at other BigBiz and make a play to take the other guys out with a knockout blow and get the costs back under control.

We’ve seen this time and again, notably starting with the railroad wars in the late 1800’s, where BigBiz makes war against other BigBiz for market dominance and control, and it has carried through to recent times with the holy war of Apple vs. Microsoft and the browser wars and now this and everything else going on in BigBizLand.

CVS just bought Aetna. The first major retailer to enter the health insurance marketspace. They wish to control the supply chain triangle from the shipping steps of Big Pharma all the way to the little white bag being handed over the counter at your local drugstore to the billing clerk at your Primary Care Provider’s office and your doctor who prescribes the meds.

Jeff Bezos saw this and thought, well fuck them, I am going to either buy United or Cigna and Walgreen’s or start my own thing. Let’s call up Warren and hear what he has to say about this.

I would expect just what I said: Amazon will buy Walgreen’s in 2018 and United Health in 2019.

Why else would they bring in JP Morgan/Chase? Why not WalMart or someone else with a ton of employees? Because JP Morgan is in this to finance and orchestrate the biggest health care acquisitions in history.

Watch.

https://www.benzinga.com/analyst-ratings/analyst-color/17/10/10155782/amazon-could-partner-with-unitedhealth-for-pharmacy-uni

https://www.thestreet.com/story/14409590/1/walgreens-amazon-could-be-next-big-hookup-now-that-cvs-bought-aetna.html

p.s.: Honey can you pick up my prescriptions at Whole Foods? And get more milk, please.

pps: Can you also stop in and ask the AmazonUnited rep about adding a dental plan for the kids for next year?

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