Should-Read: Ann Marie Marciarille: The Amazon Threat to Kill the Hungry Tapeworm

Should-Read: Ann Marie Marciarille: The Amazon Threat to Kill the Hungry Tapeworm: “Health industry stock analysts and observers have been wondering for some time about Amazon’s potential to enter the marketplace for health care goods and services…

…obtained wholesale pharmaceutical distribution licenses in twelve states…. Now… Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, and JP Morgan have announced their intention to create a multi-employer not for profit health insurance plan/health care provider, it is not only the pharmaceutical sector that is speculating on what all this could mean…. Health care delivery as well as employer sponsored health insurance is contemplated…. We do have a significant historic example of a business person inexperienced in health care delivery and health insurance taking these industries by storm. That is what Henry Kaiser did, beginning in the Richmond Kaiser shipyards of the 1930’s on site and opened for public enrollment in the 1940’s. Henry Kaiser had clear goals: bind his employees to his shipyards with an attractive plan at a time when war time frozen wages could not perform this function and offer better workplace injury care in order to keep wartime production moving… a better workers comp system… moved to employer sponsored health insurance… had an interest in redeeming his mother Mary Kaiser’s death at the age of 52 from untreated kidney disease… chronic nephritis…. untreated because she could not afford the care required and Henry, a teenager at the time, could not afford it for her….

One collaborative press release does not an integrated health care delivery/health insurance company make. Even a collaborative press release as wonderful as today’s quoting Warren Buffet vowing to help attack the health care costs that are a hungry tapeworm on American business and the American economy raises more questions than it answers…