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

Cory Doctorow 11:43 am Tue Jan 30, 2018

Investor Warren Buffet, world's-richest-guy Jeff Bezos and cartoon villain Jamie Dimon have announced that their firms will collaborate to create an unnamed health insurer that is "free from profit-making incentives and constraints" (though that does not necessarily mean it will be a nonprofit, of course).

The insurer will initially only serve the businesses' own employees. The founders have not ruled out extending coverage to others in the future.

Warren Buffet described the existing healthcare industry as "a hungry tapeworm on the American economy."

While the effort is clearly at an early stage, the news was enough to shake up investors in the health care sector. Shares of established health insurers such as UnitedHealth, (UNH) Anthem (ANTX), Aetna (AET) and Cigna (CI) were all down in premarket trading immediately following the announcement, as were shares of Humana (HUM), a hospital operator, drugstore retailers CVS (CVS) and Walgreens (WBA) and prescription service Express Script (ESRX). Shares of Amazon and JPMorgan were also slightly lower, while Berkshire Hathaway was unchanged.

Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett and Jamie Dimon want to fix health care
[Chris Isidore/CNN]

(Image: Steve Jurvetson, CC-BY)

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