The premise sounds like it is waiting for a punchline: “Three business titans walk into a bar. How do they fix the American health care system?”
The answer has yet to be determined, and Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett and Jamie Dimon have not offered any details. But in announcing plans last week to create a company that will provide health care solutions for their employees, the trio has sent ripples through the industry.
Considering that Bezos, Buffett and Dimon combine to employ more than 1 million people and that they have a history of disruptive innovation, the announcement has drawn much attention. And considering that the American health care system has been an intractable problem, the announcement was welcomed by just about everybody except for insurance companies and their stockholders. For too long, the problems plaguing U.S. health care have been greeted with little more than shrugs by stakeholders and nothing more than efforts by elected representatives to undermine the Affordable Care Act.
“The ballooning costs of health care act as a hungry tapeworm on the American economy,” Buffett said. “Our group does not come to this problem with answers. But we also do not accept it as inevitable.” Buffett is chairman of Berkshire Hathaway; Bezos is founder and chairman of Amazon; and Dimon is chairman of JPMorgan Chase, the nation’s largest bank. When Buffett, Bezos and Dimon talk, people listen.
And there is much need for listening. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, the United States in 2015 spent $9,415 per person on health care, by far the highest average among wealthy nations. Comparable countries spent about half as much per person. The United States spends roughly 18 percent of its Gross Domestic Product on health care, while other wealthy nations average 9 percent.
Such expenditures would be justifiable if they were commensurate with superior outcomes, but that is not the case. According to the World Health Organization, the United States ranks 32nd in life expectancy; according to the CIA World Factbook, it ranks below Slovakia, Guam, Latvia and many others in infant mortality rates. By almost every metric, U.S. citizens are not getting what they pay for when it comes to health care, and that fact predates the 2010 passage of the Affordable Care Act.
Bezos, Buffett and Dimon are approaching the issue from the perspective of business and a desire to reduce costs. “Hard as it might be, reducing health care’s burden on the economy while improving outcomes for employees and their families would be worth the effort,” Bezos said.
If they disrupt the system along the way, that could prove beneficial for the American people as a whole. As columnist Jon Talton wrote for The Seattle Times: “Health care is an epic market failure as practiced in the U.S. Efforts at using market forces and fads, from incentives and HMOs to massive consolidation, have not worked.”
It is shameful that the public should have to look at a private initiative from three billionaires to find hope for the U.S. health care system. Leaders in Washington, D.C., should be holding hearings and meeting with stakeholders and consumers to build upon the successes of the Affordable Care Act and improve its shortcomings, rather than engaging in ideologically fueled fights over its mere existence.
In the absence of that, we hope that Bezos, Buffett and Dimon can find solutions for the punchline that is American health care.
