Amazon, Berkshire, and JPM are Diving into Healthcare

Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, and JP Morgan Chase announced last month the introduction of their new independent healthcare system, Haven Healthcare.  Haven is targeted to offer more affordable and transparent care to patients, starting with Amazon, BH, and JPM employees and eventually scaling to the public market. The companies, combined, employ over 1.2 million people and insure as many as 2.6 million in the United States. Like many US companies, Haven voiced that the founding corporations are “frustrated by the quality, service, and high costs that their employees and families have experienced in the U.S.”

It’s not a unique sentiment. Other business giants including GM, Disney, and Intel have also begun exploring leveraging their population size to create innovative and affordable health solutions for their employees. With many employers funding 80% of healthcare costs, employee health is a painful burden that is eating away at the bottom line. Additionally, continued growth in national healthcare spending is passing costs on to employees, causing premiums to soar and routine care to be out-of-budget. Over time, this inaccessibility of care hurts employee health and increases costs exponentially long-term.

Haven Healthcare aims to be a “safe space” for employee health. Using both innovative and simplified approaches to patient treatment, they propose to offer quality healthcare and affordable prices. Price transparency plays into their goal of accountability to prioritize patients over profits, and health incentives encourage patients to maintain good health over time.

Though the patient-centered approach has obvious benefits for patients, ultimately the investment in prolonged affordable healthcare frees up valuable capital for the corporations to use in areas of business growth- propelling businesses like Amazon, Berkshire, and JPM into higher profit margins and its employees into better care.