Corporations Won’t Fix American Health Care. They Already Run It.
The recent news from Amazon, JPMorgan Chase and Berkshire Hathaway that the three companies plan to team up to create a new company to manage the health care needs of their employees has prompted a flurry of excited pronouncements about what this new venture means for the future of health care delivery in the United States.
Fox Business praised the new company as nothing short of “revolutionary,” while Bloomberg enthused it had the potential for “disrupting the broader industry.” CNBC predicted the group could succeed “where insurers and government have failed.”
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Yet all these responses ― from touting the new venture as an innovative disruption to hailing it as a needed private sector response to the government’s failure ― demonstrate a lack of historical perspective on how health care has operated in the United States and how our strange system of tying health insurance to employment has created our present circumstances. In this light, the new venture from Amazon et al. isn’t a radical intervention in the system but merely a natural evolution of what is already in place. More importantly, it’s a response to the failure of free market capitalism, not the government.
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. . . it’s important to recognize that the new health care company Amazon, JPMorgan Chase and Berkshire Hathaway are launching has been prompted by their own dissatisfaction with current private market options. Their plan offers a critique of what free market capitalism has generated, not an indictment of the federal government.
It also bears repeating that this joint venture will serve only the three companies’ own employees. While the new company may have lessons for other employers, it will not provide the sort of wholesale disruption of the American health care system that so many have breathlessly predicted. More likely, it will merely be yet another tinkering at the margins, yielding small ripples of innovation rather than a tidal wave of change.
For a radical overhaul, for a true disruption, there’s really only one possible actor: the federal government.
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