I feel Buffet and Bezos have the technical capacity and certainly the capital to tackle this issue.
They can't fix the entire HC market, but they can have a great start.
They can't fix the entire HC market, but they can have a great start.
This is why I believe single payer healthcare is generally the best solution.
However, in the current situation, I think this idea to create a healthcare company dedicated to serving their employees, "free from profit-making incentives and constraints," is a great idea, one which I hope others will attempt if it ends up a success.
What i’d love to see is a commercial business having vertical integration. Insanely cheap basics like X-rays, mris, and other checks. Heavy use of AI based diagnosis confirmed by doctors, and a big insurance pool where profits go back into scaling healthcare.
Basically current American healthcare is not scalable. Period.
I'm not too sure about that. It's taken an entire year for the GOP to start to actually succeed at chipping away at the ACA, and they have legislative and executive control. If we could get sweeping reform in a more favorable political climate, something not plagued with the implementation issues the ACA has labored under, it might stand a chance. The next administration might find it politically untenable to take it away if it actually works well.
You just might not have the option of telling someone it's 10 grand (with ridiculous profit margins) to get an earlier diagnosis and a chance at actually living.
Another true story, even with a Health Care provider and insurance company I don’t hate: after a routine visit, I had to spend more time on the phone with both of them than I spent in front of the Dr In order to have the service code corrected so the payment would count towards my deductible. The administrators I had to work with are paid employees, their costs not only have to be covered, but profitable. Very polite, capable and professional and completely unnecessary. I dare any non-American to come into our system and figure out in-network vs. out of network, co-payment, co-insurance, personal deductibles, family deductibles, lifetime maximums, deductible vs. non deductible services... and then write an App that compares plans, even within the same insurer’s portfolio and tells me which is the better plan.
Intentional value obfuscation, unnecessarily complex, adds to the bottom line.
Fortunately we have the option of publicly funded health care here in Europe which is what she recommends for anything serious.
If I profit off of you being sick, then I need to keep you sick.
But this has other problems. Incentives are tricky.
The downside I was hinting at is that as a patient, cutting costs isn't always what you want. If it means more prevention or paying less, it's good. Otherwise it'll probably mean worse service.
They profit much more if you pay them money but never use their service.
Healthcare should be nationalized. Then the government would also have other positive incentives meant to lower healthcare costs, like reducing pollution, sugar in foods, other dangerous foods on the market, and so on.
I mean if you want to make an anti-capitalist argument on a message board owned by a venture capital firm, feel free. But by definition "profit = good"
There's an entire college course called Philosophy I that basically goes over 7 to 10 different moral compasses. The only one that seems to win out (aka the only one people remember after the class is Moral Relativism).
They know all their companies will earn more money if there is more money in everyone’s pockets. Look at how much some people are spending per year on healthcare. Someone in this thread mentioned $30k for his family in a year just for insurance. If he even saved a third of that, it’d end up being spent somewhere. A good economy benefits all those big companies. The losers in this are the healthcare companies.
Amazon might decide to make their own networking hardware or their own power generation for their datacenters to save money, but they spend more money on headcount than on datacenters, and a huge chunk of the headcount expense goes to health insurance companies.
As long as this company doesn’t go public, it seems like it will be able to stay away from that. It will be extremely competitive against companies trying to raise profits.
You can always hope for the best so let's see what happens. Looking at the American health system I am not very optimistic.
Berkshire is a holding company, all the not so nice decisions are made by the CEOs of the companies Berkshire owns.
Berkshire has never paid a dime of dividends to anybody.
That’s a great thing.
What's your next premise?
I'm not evaluating Buffett either way with that statement, just pointing out that it is possible and probably necessary to evaluate his behavior without giving consideration to his pledge.
Most people used to do both at the same time and it seemed to work pretty well before Buffett came along. And there's a good analogy to your last point - someone who rents an apartment for 40 years when they could have bought an equivalently valued home two times over. They shouldn't complain when they die with a net worth of zero, they had a roof over their head for 40 years!
Also, mutual policy holders don't "overpay" for insurance as all dividends are returned to them. Only a private insurance company policy holder could overpay. Just thinking about it now, Buffett wouldn't be so rich if his policy holders weren't overpaying, as you're implying.
Fortunately they have plenty of lobbyist which can be put to good use.