That governments have failed at healthcare reform is axiomatic. The disasters attended with the Obamacare law, also known as the Affordable Care Act, have been well documented. The kind of government-run healthcare system beloved by Bernie Sanders that exists in Canada and Great Britain features months-long waits for procedures and even documented cases where patients were allowed to die rather than be treated. The Charlie Gard tragedy comes to mind.

Therefore, the announcement by Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, and J.P. Morgan, that they have formed a partnership to provide Affordable Healthcare to their employees, is inspiring a great deal of interest.

Can the private sector succeed where the government has so conspicuously failed?

Better healthcare through technology.

Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, is especially aware of the complexity of the task that the three companies have set out to perform. Few details have been provided about how the joint venture. The collaboration will be in the form of a nonprofit corporation and will be heavily reliant on cutting-edge technology. Healthcare has fostered the development of technology to diagnose and treat diseases. The problem, thus far, is that new healthcare technology is often exceedingly expensive to develop and even more costly to deploy. The trick will be to use new procedures and tools to cut the cost of healthcare while still providing treatments that would have been impossible just a few years ago.

Will the joint venture save us from single payer health care?

Despite the manifest disaster that government-run, single-payer healthcare has been overseas, many politicians in the United States have been hell-bent on imposing it on the last surviving holdout in the industrialized world. Government run healthcare provides political elites yet another tool for power over their fellow human beings.

The most significant service that the alliance of Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, and J.P. Morgan could perform is to demonstrate that the private sector can provide affordable healthcare without visiting the horrors, on Americans, that patients and their families have had to suffer overseas. The joint venture will initially be just for employees of the three companies involved but can be expanded later.

Indeed, if the new approach has success, we can look to other businesses and entities, such as small business associations, to copy the method.

In effect, Bezos and his partners are proposing to solve the healthcare problem by getting government out of the process. The approach has worked famously in so many other areas of life.
© ALL RIGHTS RESERVED