Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, Amazon and the New York bank JPMorgan Chase... (Associated Press) This combination of photos from left shows Warren Buffett on Sept. 19, 2017, in New York, Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon.com, on Sept. 24, 2013, in Seattle and JP Morgan Chase Chairman and CEO Jamie Dimon... (Associated Press) 
 
 Amazon is diving into health care, teaming up with Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway and the New York bank JPMorgan Chase, to create a company that helps their U.S. employees find quality care "at a reasonable cost." “The ballooning costs of health care act as a hungry tapeworm on the American economy,” Berkshire Chief Executive Warren Buffett said in prepared remarks. "Our group does not come to this problem with answers. But we also do not accept it as inevitable.” 
 
 ... Shares in health care companies took a big hit in early trading Tuesday, hinting at the threat of the new entity to how health care is paid for and delivered in the U.S. 
 
 Before the opening bell, eight of the top 10 decliners on the Standard & Poor's 500 index were health care companies. Express Scripts and Aetna sank 3 percent; Cigna slid percent while CVS and UnitedHealth fell 4 percent. "Hard as it might be, reducing healthcare's burden on the economy while improving outcomes for employees and their families would be worth the effort." "The three of our companies have extraordinary resources, and our goal is to create solutions that benefit our U.S. employees, their families and, potentially, all Americans." The three companies, which bring their scale and complementary expertise to this long-term effort, will pursue this objective through an independent company that is free from profit-making incentives and constraints. The initial focus of the new company will be on technology solutions that will provide U.S. employees and their families with simplified, high-quality and transparent healthcare at a reasonable cost.  This combination of photos from left shows Warren Buffett on Sept. 19, 2017, in New York, Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon.com, on Sept. 24, 2013, in Seattle and JP Morgan Chase Chairman and CEO Jamie Dimon... (Associated Press) 
 
 This combination of photos from left shows Warren Buffett on Sept. 19, 2017, in New York, Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon.com, on Sept. 24, 2013, in Seattle and JP Morgan Chase Chairman and CEO Jamie Dimon on July 12, 2013, in New York.
– "The ballooning costs of health care act as a hungry tapeworm on the American economy," says Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett, and he has teamed up with some equally huge names in an attempt to go after said tapeworm. Amazon.com, Berkshire Hathaway, and JPMorgan Chase on Tuesday announced that they'd be creating a company tasked with coming up with technological solutions that can cut health-care costs for their hundreds of thousands of US employees. "Our group does not come to this problem with answers," Buffett notes—nor, reports the Wall Street Journal, with details on how much it plans to spend, where the company's HQ will be, or how many of its own employees would be impacted—"but we also do not accept it as inevitable." What the companies' leaders did reveal is that the new company will be "free from profit-making incentives and constraints." "The healthcare system is complex, and we enter into this challenge open-eyed about the degree of difficulty," says Jeff Bezos of Amazon, per CNBC, which notes the three companies employ a total 1.1 million workers, though that figure is not exclusive to the US. The AP reports it's unclear whether the trio would welcome other companies into the effort, but it does flag this line from JPMorgan's Jamie Dimon: "Our goal is to create solutions that benefit our US employees, their families and, potentially, all Americans." But they're not exactly benefiting Wall Street at the moment: Pre-market trading was unkind to health care companies, with the AP noting they represented eight of the 10 down companies on the S&P 500.