If Apple wants to reshape health care, it should get involved with the joint venture created by Jamie Dimon, Jeff Bezos, and Warren Buffett, CNBC’s Jim Cramer contended Wednesday.
Dimon, chairman and CEO of J.P. Morgan, would need to be the one to bring Apple in since Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway owns a huge stake in the tech stock that could appear “self serving,” said Cramer, whose charitable trust also owns shares of Apple. “It is really time for, I think, that ecosystem to embrace the Apple ecosystem.”
Through their venture, Amazon‘s Bezos, Buffett, and Dimon are working on ways to cut health costs and improve services for their U.S. employees. The three titans hope that the sheer sizes of their companies will help bring the necessary scale and resources to tackle the health-care system’s most pertinent issues.
Dr. Atul Gawande, a surgeon and professor at Harvard Medical School, is taking the lead on the new health-care company.
In an interview with Cramer that aired Tuesday night, Apple CEO Tim Cook teased that the company will announce new services this year, especially in the realm of health care. Apple has been investing in health and wellness in recent years as it capitalized on the success of its Apple Watch and hired dozens of doctors to bolster its health technology segment.
“I believe, if you zoom out into the future, and you look back, and you ask the question, ‘What was Apple’s greatest contribution to mankind?’ It will be about health,” Cook told Cramer.
Apple shares have been under pressure since the company lowered its first-quarter guidance last week, citing weakness in China’s economy. However, Wall Street analysts had already been peppering Apple’s stock with downgrades due to concerns that the company would suffer declines in iPhone unit sales over the next couple of years.
Cramer, whose has long warned his followers against selling Apple’s stock, said last week the company could eventually bottom out at $120 per share. At the time, the stock was trading around $144. Apple shares jumped 2 percent to nearly $151 each on Tuesday.
— CNBC’s
Elizabeth Gurdus
and
Christina Farr
contributed to this report.
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