But here comes Amazon.
The burgeoning collaboration between Amazon, JPMorgan Chase and Berkshire Hathaway seeking to transform the American health care system is long on ambition and short on details.
That's not stopped them before, so you can bet that there will be concessions made by insurers and practitioners.
Any prediction about the alliance’s plans must glean insight from Amazon’s success, which has been based on removing entire layers of product sales and distribution and adopting new ways of thinking. That's caused massive disruption in the retail and tech industries.
One of the first victims of failure to adapt was the Borders bookstore chain. They're gone. Sears stores and K-Marts are dropping like flies as well. One thing that's certain to arise from this health care alliance is an increase in automated services in a number of areas of the sector, including telemedicine. And Amazon's already looking into establishing online pharmacies.
Times are going to get really interesting, given that healthcare industries employ some 12.5 million people in the USA.