Buffett and fellow billionaires fail to tame health care costs

It's the end of the line for the joint venture created by Amazon's Jeff Bezos, Berkshire Hathaway's Warren Buffett, and JPMorgan Chase's Jamie Dimon to fight rising health costs and improve care.

CNBC.com broke the news this week that after three years in operation, Haven will shut down by the end of next month, with many of its 57 employees going to work at one of the three companies.

Haven's website says it "explored a wide range of healthcare solutions, as well as piloted new ways to make primary care easier to access, insurance benefits simpler to understand and easier to use, and prescription drugs more affordable."

Amazon, Berkshire and JPMorgan will "leverage these insights and continue to collaborate informally to design programs tailored to address the specific needs of their own employee populations." 

"People with direct knowledge of the matter" tell CNBC.com that while Haven came up with ideas, the three founding companies then did their own projects with their own people, "obviating the need for the joint venture to begin with."

Writing for The Los Angeles Times, Michael Hiltzik argues Haven "was a dead duck from the start."

He thinks "the flaw in the billionaires' reasoning was that controlling healthcare costs required some kind of deep magic that only they could access."

What's really needed, he argues, is to focus on the "political forces" that support the "hospitals, physicians, pharmaceutical companies, device manufacturers and health insurers" with a profit motive in the private sector that "all have an interest, individually and combined, to fight efforts to cut their take of the pie."

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BERKSHIRE'S TOP STOCK HOLDINGS - January 8, 2021

Berkshire's top holdings of disclosed publicly-traded U.S. stocks by market value, based on today's closing prices.

Holdings are as of September 30, 2020 as reported in Berkshire Hathaway and New England Asset Management's 13F filings on November 16, 2020.

The full list of holdings and current market values is available from CNBC.com's Berkshire Hathaway Portfolio Tracker.

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-- Alex Crippen, Editor, Warren Buffett Watch