Are New Health Care Partnerships Truly Revolutionary?
There has been a thunderous response to the new partnership announced by Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan Chase, but is this response deserved? When Amazon and its partners announced that they would create a new company to provide health care to U.S. workers at their companies, the stock prices of many major pharmaceutical and health care companies fell dramatically. Pharmacy manager Express Scripts Holding Co. experienced an 11 percent drop in share prices, while CVS and Anthem saw a 6.4 and 6.5 percent devaluation respectively. Shareholders are obviously afraid that Amazon could do to health care what it has done to retail—completely overtake and reshape the industry. Although the initial announcement was short on details, it did paint the broad outline of the new organization “that is free from profit-making…