Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett, JPMorgan starting healthcare company

As part of their effort to improve employee satisfaction and reduce healthcare costs, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan Chase have agreed to work together to provide healthcare for their employees. The goal is to create create an healthcare company that would be “free from profit-making incentives and constraints.” The companies provided few details of their plans in a release, and said they were still in the early stages of developing their initiative. The announcement came amid growing rumors that Amazon’s executives are looking at ways to disrupt the healthcare industry. Shares of pharmacy benefits managers CVS and ExpressScripts, as well as insurance giants UnitedHealth and Aetna, fell following the news.

“The ballooning costs of healthcare act as a hungry tapeworm on the American economy,” Berkshire CEO Warren Buffett said in a statement. “Our group does not come to this problem with answers. But we also do not accept it as inevitable. Rather, we share the belief that putting our collective resources behind the country’s best talent can, in time, check the rise in health costs while concurrently enhancing patient satisfaction and outcomes.”

“The healthcare system is complex, and we enter into this challenge open-eyed about the degree of difficulty,” said Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. “Hard as it might be, reducing healthcare’s burden on the economy while improving outcomes for employees and their families would be worth the effort.”

The healthcare premiums have increased over the past decade as shown in the chart below.