QuestionerAll right, this question comes from Bill Begley, who said, could you tell us what happened to the joint venture between Berkshire, J.P. Morgan, and Amazon to investigate what could be done about the current state of medical health care in the United States? The only item I read was that it was disbanded. Do you have any lessons to be learned from your effort?
WarrenWell, we learned a lot about the difficulty of changing around an industry. than 17% of GDP, and we learned, we accomplished a lesser objective, which was probably more important to us even than either J.P. Morgan or Amazon, because we knew less about our own system than they did. They knew that they were more centralized operations. So we got some benefits in the sense that we looked at 60 or 70 different operations we had presently, and we And that's one case where a certain amount of centralization, at least in certain aspects of it, can save real money. I mean, we found inefficiencies. And like I say, we probably saved more than the other two partners because they knew their situation better. We found some dumb things we were doing. So we got our money's worth. But in terms of the big picture of change. something that so many people have a vested interest in doing, and there's one additional factor to it, which is really interesting. There's an ingenious aspect to it and goes back to a fellow named, which didn't have any direct connection, but Beardsley Rummel. And nobody's ever heard of Beardsley Rummel, but Beardsley Rummel in 1941 came up with the idea of the withholding tax. So people, instead of April 15th having to write a check and thinking how much they hated their politicians and hated the government and everything else, they actually looked at as kind of a Christmas club and there were overpayments involved and they actually got a check when the final payment came to. So when you aren't writing the check yourself, you know, you may know that the health benefit from your company is worth $10,000 a year to you or $15,000 and it may cost them that much, but it may cost the company that much. But you don't see it. So the company pays it. And most of the people in that waiting room sitting next to me, when they are not sitting there are thinking about whether I can afford to do this, you know, or what's this going to do? They're generally under some kind of a plan, not always, obviously. But they don't think that if the company wasn't paying them that, they could pay them to have
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Warrenthat in additional compensation. But of course, the weird system is the company gets it. deduction if they pay it but if you pay it yourself on a policy I don't believe you get a deduction of it so it's it's something that's most of the people are not seeing as a cost to them and they like that pretty well
Questionerno kidding
Warrenyeah well but that's that's true the federal income tax I mean it was an active genius from the standpoint of the government to go to a withholding system and and if you didn't just of how many people on April 15th would have to sit down and write a pretty good size check and they'd be mad they wouldn't like it and they don't feel it now so we we were up that you know that's an obvious point but you also people like their doctor in in general and they don't like the fact that it's 17 percent of GDP but one is just kind of a you know amorphous sort of thing and the other is very very real to them and the most prestigious people in the community are on the hospital boards and a lot of people that that are fairly happy with the system so so we did not make inroads on that and we are paying 17 percent of GDP for health care and no major country is more than 11 percent and in the pandemic you know we've had a death rate that or a death total as the percentage of population that's way higher than the rest of the world not every single country but way higher so it you know we've laid out more money and gotten a poor result in terms of this particular pandemic in terms of deaths per capita now that may not turn out to be the
Charlieoh Warren even though you shot it and missed you were at least shooting in an elephant the cost of health care in Singapore is 20 percent of what it is in the United States and their medical system works better so you were shooting at a huge elephant but as you found out it's very hard to people to get very enthusiastic about losing part of their income
Warrenoh yeah no i said we were fighting a tapeworm yeah uh and they were gonna be and the tapeworm one the tapeworm the tapeworm the tapeworm the tapeworm that's that's good wonderful phrase the tapeworm i'll have to copy that
Charliewell it wasn't a phrase we were looking but