Amazon, JPMorgan Chase and Berkshire Hathaway are teaming up to provide better healthcare solutions for their employees, the companies said. The goal is to provide a better healthcare option for their U.S.-based employees. The three mega-companies will be creating a separate company to provide healthcare for employees that will be “free from profit-making incentives and constraints,” a statement released by the three companies read.
Warren Buffet, the wunderkind billionaire investor from Omaha, says the company’s focus will be the skyrocketing costs of healthcare. “The ballooning costs of health care act as a hungry tapeworm on the American economy,” the CEO of Berkshire Hathaway said. “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 healthcare system is complex, and we enter into this challenge open-eyed about the degree of difficulty,” the CEO of tech giant Amazon Jeff Bezos said. “Hard as it might be, reducing healthcare’s burden on the economy while improving outcomes for employees and their families would be worth the effort.”
Jamie Dimon, CEO of the nation’s largest bank JPMorgan Chase touted the economies of scale that might arise out of a joint venture like this one. “The three of our companies have extraordinary resources, and our goal is to create solutions that benefit our U.S. employees, their families and, potentially, all Americans,” Dimon said.
The planning for the company is at a very early stage. Each CEO named an executive that would be spearheading the effort on their side, but longer-term management announcements, a location or even a name for the company are yet to be determined.
Still, the news was enough to shake up premarket trading in the healthcare sector this morning after the announcement. Major players in healthcare like insurers UnitedHealth, Aetna and Cigna, saw their stocks dip a little bit on the announcement. Pharmacy chains CVS and Walgreens did as well. Shares of Amazon and JPMorgan were also slightly lower in premarket trading. Berkshire Hathaway shares were unchanged.