THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

What do you get when you put two of America's richest men and America's skeeviest banker together? One thing is a potentially game changing healthcare company.

Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan Chase announced on Tuesday that they would form an independent health care company to serve their employees in the United States.

The three companies provided few details about the new entity, other than saying it would initially focus on technology to provide simplified, high-quality health care for their employees and their families, and at a reasonable cost. They said the initiative, which is in the early planning stages, would be a long-term effort “free from profit-making incentives and constraints.”

The partnership brings together three of the country’s most influential companies to try to improve a system that other companies have tried and failed to change: Amazon, the largest online retailer in the world; Berkshire Hathaway, the holding company led by the billionaire investor Warren E. Buffett; and JPMorgan Chase, the largest bank in the United States by assets.

It also illustrates the rapid changes affecting the health care industry in the United States, where lines that have separated traditionally distinct sectors, like care provision and insurance, are increasingly blurred. CVS Health’s deal last month to buy the health insurer Aetna for about $69 billion is just one example of the shifts underway.

“It could be big,” Ed Kaplan, who negotiates health coverage on behalf of large employers as the national health practice leader for the Segal Group, said of the announcement. “Those are three big players, and I think if they get into health care insurance or the health care coverage space they are going to make a big impact.”

Mr. Kaplan said larger insurers were frustratingly inefficient when it came to fixing problems like people visiting the emergency room when they did not need to, or requiring a doctor’s visit for routine tasks like refilling a prescription.

“There should be a way to avoid things like that, but they’re not really innovating,” he said of the health insurance companies. “They’re talking a good game, but they’re not really doing it.”

He said Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan Chase would face challenges such as assessing risk and other skills that competing insurers are skilled at, but that they could hire talented employees to provide that.

“The health care system is complex, and we enter into this challenge open-eyed about the degree of difficulty,” Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder and chief executive, said in a statement. “Hard as it might be, reducing health care’s burden on the economy while improving outcomes for employees and their families would be worth the effort. Success is going to require talented experts, a beginner’s mind, and a long-term orientation.”

So far it is only talk, but the potential is immense and the three men involved got noses as hard as anybody in the business world and the money and influence to walk any walk they talk about.