QuestionerI'm curious, what ultimately led to the end of your health care venture with J.P. Morgan and Amazon? And given your commitment to value in long-term thinking, would you ever consider taking another look at health insurance reform in the U.S.? Yeah, we're spending close, it's hardly the precise figure, but close to 20% of GDP on health. And if you go back to 1960, there were a number of countries.
WarrenSo we're each spending around 5%. And then the lines began to diverge dramatically, but the mathematical fact that there are only 100 percentage points in the equation didn't change. So we tried that experiment with J.P. Morgan and Amazon. We had three people that didn't think they knew the answer, but thought that, in my case, I used to term, that it was a tapeworm in the economy. And we also found out that the tapeworm was alive in every part of the country. I mean, the hospitals liked it. The hospitals had prominent people working with people. People generally like their doctor. I didn't like the, but didn't like the system, I mean, all kinds of things. But in the end, J.P. Morgan and Amazon and Berkshire were not going to have any effect on changing that 20%. Now, that 20%, there are only utter percentage points available. And one other countries spend six or seven percent and perhaps use our system to their advantage, which is also very true. You know, that is an enormous percentage of an economy. And we simply, it was too entrenched to really do much in the way of change. And we spent some money on it, and we did some work, and we learned a good bit about our own systems. And we saw the degree to which the system was ingrained in so many people's, you know, whether the health care providers or whether everybody, and these aren't evil people. I mean, they're just, they're just going about something and trying to save lives. But we found that whether it was in Canada or France or Britain or whatever it might be, if you looked at our costs, that they were just far higher. some extent we were subsidizing the rest of the world and people would come to the United States to do the really unusual or challenging health in terms of operations and that sort of thing. But we made no progress. And governments, you know, I mean, it's so involved in the situation and health is so important to most people to everybody. The, as I said to Jamie and Jeff, I said, well, the tapeworm won.
[4:13]
WarrenAnd problems of society, when you get 20% or GDP going into a given industry, enthusiasm for changing that industry, the political power that the industry will have. And that doesn't mean they're evil. And, you know, everybody, they just end up there. So I don't know the conclusion we didn't know the answer three of us and we had the money to do it, didn't know, 130 million people felt about their doctor, fell about their health care, what they felt entitled to, and I wish we had an answer for you, but I was somewhat pessimistic going in and I was a little more pessimistic when we came out, but I'm glad we did what we did. And we learned something about our own failing. in the process. So Berkshire, in effect, got its money's worth, but we didn't kill the tapeworm.