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.