Healthcare and elites
Apple has copied Amazon’s recent move to provide primary healthcare for its employees in conjunction with JP Morgan and Berkshire Hathaway, announcing the launch of clinics for its staff it says will deliver “the world’s best healthcare experience.”
The move highlights the many deficiencies with the US healthcare system: if your company doesn’t pay your health insurance, you risk not being able to pay for treatment of even minor illnesses, never mind prolonged hospitalization. In response, the tech giants, obsessed with attracting and retaining talent as a way to ensure their continued success, have decided to take the bull by the horns and have come up with their own solutions, turning their workers into members of a happy elite who don’t have to worry about what happens if they fall sick.
Beyond putting the minds of their employees at rest, what Apple or Amazon seem to be doing here is trying to create a preventive healthcare model that requires a shift in our approach to looking after ourselves. Increasingly, working for one of these companies means not just a good salary but a whole range of benefits that now include primary healthcare. The tech giants own swathes real estate in the heart of many US cities where tens of thousands of their employees work and for whom they are also able to leverage advantages with landlords, advancing rent down payments, for example.
Everybody knows we could all do more to improve our health care: for most of the history of humanity, we have only sought help when a specific problem has arisen. A genuinely preventative approach would include the kind of monitoring that many Amazon and Apple employees are already encouraged to practice and that furthermore, could align with its future objectives: Amazon is known for developing services to meet its own needs, later opening them up to third parties to help pay for them, while Apple has taken a socio-sanitary approach based on the use of iPhones and Apple Watches, and is also working on other devices that would help with non-intrusive measurement of blood glucose, for example. Yesterday, while attending the MWC in Barcelona, I took the opportunity to talk to Ádám Csörghe of WIWE, a company that manufactures a small device the size of a credit card that provides a fully functional electrocardiogram. Monitoring is playing an ever-bigger role in health care thanks to cheaper and simpler-to-use devices, but this monitoring and continuous generation of data is something that, as I wrote about in a recent Forbes article, can only be addressed properly when our health takes priority over profits and regardless of the impact on healthcare professionals. Integrating these types of devices into a health monitoring system for a company’s employees could be the first step toward offering them to those interested in paying for them.
Other businesses could take a leaf out of the tech sector’s stance; its profitability or ability to attract and retain talent is no accident, but in part due to an approach that puts its employees’ welfare first, and in some cases that of the families of deceased employees. A company-paid health insurance policy is a major perk in any country, and if health care is managed by the company itself and is designed to make life easier for employees and to improve their health, the benefits outweigh issues such as privacy. Similarly, such an approach encourages company loyalty and a desire to perform better.
The future of healthcare may well not be decided by governments or traditional insurers looking to boost profits at the expense of their clients, but by companies that see taking care of the health of their workers as a fundamental objective: a realignment of objectives benefitting the company and its workforce, prompting many of us to wonder if our own employers were able to offer us something similar.
(En español, aquí)
