Can you have a better A-Team than this? Amazon, Chase & Berkshire Hathaway joint venturing via a new nonprofit, Haven, to finally solve our health care problems! While I was hopeful when this joint venture was announced several years ago, I was also deeply skeptical. Rather than addressing the root causes of health costs, such as inactivity and unhealthy nutrition, Haven tried to "develop new ways to improve access to primary care, simplify insurance coverage and make prescription drugs more affordable"--including by throwing a lot of "big data" tech innovations at these issues. While this approach was pitched as a breakthrough, it was more of a Disease Management 2.0--focusing on more cost-efficient "care," rather than less chronic conditions to begin with. The latter is the ultimate solution, but requires far more than blue-chip brands plus high-tech to resolve--and a lot more time. 2-3 years of effort just scratches the surface. Dramatic
The answer to this question should be a no-brainer: Is it better to pay trillions of dollars annually in preventable chronic health costs, or pay a cumulative $500-600 billion or so one-time in student college loan defaults or Great Recession mortgage losses ? Hmmm. We got the massive Dodd-Frank Reform in 2010 to prevent future financial catastrophes, and hopefully Great Recession 2.0--which cost private lenders $535B, plus much collateral damage to families & the economy. We then got Obama-era regulations, subsequently reversed under Trump , to reduce student loan defaults. Now Biden has proposed eliminating all public college/university, historically black college and undergraduate student debt . This would make a big dent in about $585B in expected student loan defaults. So where are the massive federal proposals to head off chronic diseases before they start? With total US health spending at about $4T/year, that implies about $2T/year in preventable annual chronic c