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Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, JPMorgan End Health-Care Venture Haven

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21–30 of 37 posts

Re: Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, JPMorgan End Health-Care Venture Haven

#21
post #2

I'd be curious to know some more details. The article says turnover was a problem at all levels, but why? I am in this same industry and I'm really interested to learn what a massively well connected and funded startup discovered that made it better to toss in the towel.

Admittedtly without evidence, I would speculate that they ran up against institutional players who had better lobbying power for this industry. There is no technical limitation to explain why our healthcare system sucks, it's some crazy combination of inefficient policies, beaurocracies, and established parties who benefit from the preceding two. But agreed, would love to see more.

Everyone wants it fixed but nobody wants to lose money.

Re: Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, JPMorgan End Health-Care Venture Haven

#22
post #20

I keep hoping that someone makes a run at the most obvious health care need: a consumer centric medical record that you control with automated diagnosis engine. Diagnosis is fundamentally an information problem, so should be zero marginal cost. Generic drugs have near zero marginal costs, so the idea that most healthcare needs to be expensive is incorrect from first principles. I think if this is impossible in the US…

Unlike commodities, there is no upper bound on the utility of health: people would pay as much as they can afford to have their health. Hence there's no rational (as we define the term in economic theories) reason to aim for lower prices, regardless of costs.

Re: Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, JPMorgan End Health-Care Venture Haven

#23

For anyone wanting a short summary, these two excerpts pretty much summarize the entire situation: > One key issue facing Haven was that each of the three founding companies executed their own projects separately with their own employees, obviating the need for the joint venture to begin with > Many of the Boston-based firm’s 57 workers are expected to be placed at Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway or JPMorgan Chase as the…

When three of the biggest names in America’s economy try to combine forces to upend another sector of the economy, that’s definitely news. When it fails, it’s even more so.

Re: Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, JPMorgan End Health-Care Venture Haven

#24
post #18
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A good start would be to end the need for medical licensing. It creates an artificially low supply of doctors thus increased costs. Before medical licensing there were more breakthroughs and competition.

How would you know if your doctor wasn’t a fraud?

Milton Friedman covers this in detail in “Capitalism and Freedom” if you want the full Libertarin justification, but the short answer is

1) voluntary certification, or

2) market reputation, or

3) threat of enforcement of anti-fraud laws that are less specific than licensure requirements.

The general idea being that it is seldom a good thing to remove cheap options (eg forcing poor people to go bankrupt instead of letting them choose worse care), and licensure both sets a quality floor, and also artificially restricts supply.

I think for life-and-death things like medicine this idea breaks down a bit, but that’s the end of the spectrum and how it’s argued as far as I’ve seen.

Re: Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, JPMorgan End Health-Care Venture Haven

#25
My wife is a provider in the health care industry who is licensed to provide primary care in two different states. I pay close attention to the industry, and how it functions locally, regionally, and nationally.

The best model I've found for trying to understand health care is the Tri-dimensional Chess game that is a recurring prop in Star Trek The Original Series, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-dimensional_chess#Star_T.... Different arrangements and alignments of chess boards exist in each regional market in the United States, with the chess boards representing integrated health care systems, city, county, or state-owned hospitals and care facilities, and public and private hospital groups.

As the Wikipedia article suggests, careful observation of Star Trek TOS episodes shows "boards are sometimes not even aligned consistently from one scene to the next within a single episode." This is akin to different dominant health care systems co-existing in the Philadelphia area, in Central New Jersey, in the western part of northern New Jersey, in the eastern part of northern New Jersey, and in several different areas in Downstate New York. In addition to these existing realities, in certain cases two dominant health care entities from adjacent areas collaborate to deliver services in certain hospitals and practices in areas where their respective markets meet each other.

Creating a business at scale that would be disruptive across multiple regional markets even within a 100 to 200-mile radius in certain parts of the U.S. would be extremely difficult.

Re: Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, JPMorgan End Health-Care Venture Haven

#26
post #18
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A good start would be to end the need for medical licensing. It creates an artificially low supply of doctors thus increased costs. Before medical licensing there were more breakthroughs and competition.

How would you know if your doctor wasn’t a fraud?

You would use the various methods for determining competence used in other less-regulated fields, such as degrees, certification, and word-of-mouth. The major difference would be that individuals could choose how they wished to determine which doctors they wished to use[1].

To give an example, many people who wish to become doctors are required to go through a residency program that features elements such as required 24 hours shifts. Personally, I would be quite fine seeing a doctor who wasn't required to do such shenanigans. As it stands right now, I can't make that choice, because various special interest groups have gained a government-granted monopoly on the certification of physicians.

[1] One objection would be that, if we didn't have the force of law (which is the force of violence) keeping "quacks" from practising medicine, then many people, particularly the poor, would actually have /less/ choice. This is a utilitarian argument, but even if the premise of utilitarianism is granted, this still seems incorrect due to two factors. First, regulatory capture has led to a system that already can prevent poor people from accessing care. No care is probably worse that mediocre care. Second, the U.S. (as a nation) spend more money than other developed nations on healthcare and gets similar outcomes. This seems to indicate that a lower cost of care wouldn't necessarily cause a sudden influx of quacks onto the market.

Re: Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, JPMorgan End Health-Care Venture Haven

#27

For anyone wanting a short summary, these two excerpts pretty much summarize the entire situation: > One key issue facing Haven was that each of the three founding companies executed their own projects separately with their own employees, obviating the need for the joint venture to begin with > Many of the Boston-based firm’s 57 workers are expected to be placed at Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway or JPMorgan Chase as the…

How is it a non-story?

Imagine how much money was spent on this thing, plus the copious write ups in Axios etc.

They failed. The rest is noise.

What do you think they’re “collaborating” on now that this JV is wound down?

What’s a “health care project” in the context of JPMorgan? Employees still have normal group health insurance with normal healthcare delivery.

Re: Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, JPMorgan End Health-Care Venture Haven

#28

For anyone wanting a short summary, these two excerpts pretty much summarize the entire situation: > One key issue facing Haven was that each of the three founding companies executed their own projects separately with their own employees, obviating the need for the joint venture to begin with > Many of the Boston-based firm’s 57 workers are expected to be placed at Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway or JPMorgan Chase as the…

> Seems like a non-story, IMO

The story is that an aligned, common goal isn't enough. You need cooporation and coordination to make it work. This is failure of the silo, and a reminder that in joint ventures, you have to work even harder to avoid that failure mode.

Re: Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, JPMorgan End Health-Care Venture Haven

#29

Healthcare in the United States is complicated with lots of different players. The article seems to hint at a key issue they faced: >But insiders claim that it will allow the founding companies to implement ideas from the project on their own, tailoring them to the specific needs of their employees, who are mostly concentrated in different cities. Medical services is mostly a localized service, so each city is its ow…

I priced Amazon's prescription drug service and it estimated I would be paying my co-pay on each of the drugs. Sounds good if you usually go to CVS but at Walmart I get the four prescriptions I get for $26-30.

You might want to look into why exactly you're on 4 prescriptions. Doesn't sound like a good thing. It's important to be or have a health-care advocate.

Re: Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, JPMorgan End Health-Care Venture Haven

#30
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair There's no single institution or person holding us back. Real life isn't a movie with a villain who can be defeated and then we live happily ever after. There's no magic HealthBot 3000 technology that will deliver a breakthrough in curing disease and injury, and/or disrupt current business mod…

A good start would be to end the need for medical licensing. It creates an artificially low supply of doctors thus increased costs. Before medical licensing there were more breakthroughs and competition.

Why not just license more doctors?
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