One way to size up Amazon.com's new effort to rethink U.S. health benefits is to look at thehealth benefits Amazon already offers.

The Seattle-based web retailer rattled Wall Street Tuesday byannouncing it will team up with Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathawayand JPMorgan Chase & Company to create a health care benefits company to be describedlater.

One of the few details available is that Beth Galetti, theAmazon senior vice president who signs Amazon's health plan Form5500 tax returns, will be one of the project planners.

Another detail is that Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorganChase say their new health benefits company will be "free fromprofit-making incentives and constraints."

Amazon Form 5500 filings show that Amazon already gets most ofits health benefits from a company free from profit-makingincentives and constraints: Kaiser Permanente, a giant, nonprofitmanaged care company based in Oakland, California.

Kaiser Permanente has been working to reform the U.S. healthcare delivery and finance systems since 1939. Many health policywatchers give Kaiser Permanente credit for making Californiahospitals cheaper and more efficient, on average, than comparablehospitals in the rest of the country.

Kaiser Permanente has obvious incentives to offer its ownemployees high-quality, efficient health benefits, and it has theexpertise, size and access to capital to apply the latesttools and ideas to improving its own health benefits programs.

We've tried to get an idea of how Amazon might perform as ahealth benefits revolutionizer by comparing its health benefitswith Kaiser Permanente's benefits.

Roadkill highway

One reason for trying to benchmark Amazon's proposed healthbenefits project is that the carcasses of older projects litter theside of the health reform highway.

In the past 15 years, for example:

• Congress converted the medical savings account pilot projectinto the health savings account (HSA) program.

• Google tried, and failed, to do something about U.S. consumers'personal health records chaos.

• The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) luredmany would-be health reformers to their financial doom byencouraging them to participate in the Affordable Care Act ConsumerOriented and Operated Plan (CO-OP) nonprofit health planprogram.

• Walmart added $4 prescriptions, and it and other retailers maderoom for clinics.

• Google invested in Oscar Health, which is like a CO-OP that'sfree from the regulatory chaos and restrictions at the AffordableCare Act program.

• Many organizations have come up with incentives andcommunications strategies to persuade people to eat fewer cookiesand spend more time at the gym.

Some of those efforts are still under way, and some may stillhave a shot at improving the quality and efficiency of the U.S.health care delivery system, the U.S. health care finance system,or both.

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Increases in health care costs have slowed in recent years, forexample. Many health policy specialists say HSA programs and otherprograms that "give patients skin in the game," or increasepatients' share of health care costs, have helped hold downspending.

Oscar Health and a few of the CO-OP carriers are still inbusiness, and they grow up to revolutionize health benefits.

But producers can see that, as big and smart as Amazon managersmight be, the company is taking a road that has shredded otherlarge, well-financed organizations' tires before.

The Form 5500s

Both Amazon and Kaiser Permanente give the public a peekinto their health benefits packages when they file their planForm 5500 reports.

Sponsors of many U.S. benefit plans must send copies ofForm 5500 reports to the Internal Revenue Service and the U.S.Department of Labor (DOL) every year, to help the IRS and DOLenforce benefits-related tax and labor laws.

The DOL publishes large Form 5500 filing data files on itswebsite.

FreeERISA, an ALM company, provides a tool for looking atthe filings on a company-by-company basis here.

e compared the 2016 filings we found for Amazon Corporate LLC'sGroup Health & Welfare Plan with similar filings we found forKaiser Foundation Health Plan Inc.'s Kaiser Foundation Health PlanInc. Health and Welfare Plan.

The Amazon filings include information for 13,583 covered livesand $61 million in premiums, with an average premium of about$4,500 per covered life.

The Kaiser Permanente filings provide information for 205,831covered lives and $1.3 billion in premiums, for an average of about$6,300 in spending per covered life.

The raw numbers show that Amazon spends roughly 30 percent lessper covered life than Kaiser.

Numbers in perspective

Employee comments on Glassdoor.com and other job hunter websitesshow that Amazon and Kaiser Permanente both offer great healthbenefits, but the richness level at Kaiser Permanente plansmay be even higher: One recent commenter rejoiced that a union planKaiser Permanente offers still has a $5 co-pay and nodeductible.

Another major difference between Amazon and Kaiser Permanente isthat Amazon appears to have a much younger median employee age.

Business Insider has reported, based on data from Statista, thatit believes Amazon has a median employee age of 31.

A comparable figure for Kaiser Permanente was not readilyavailable, but Kaiser Permanente appears to be similar in many waysto the federal government. The U.S. Office of Personnel Managementsays the federal employee workforce has a median age of about47.

Extrapolations based on anonymous employee survey data collectedby GreatPlacestoWork.com has collected survey data fromanonymous users who said they were Kaiser Permanente employees.Twenty-eight percent of the survey participants were ages 54or older, and 45 percent were in the "Generation X" age group,meaning that they were born from 1965 through 1980. Extrapolationsbased on those figures suggest that the median age of the surveyparticipants from Kaiser Permanente could be about 46.

Large employers now pay about 30 percent more to cover thehealth of an employee ages 45 to 54 than to cover an employee ages26 to 34, according to ADP.

If Kaiser Permanente health plan enrollees are really 15 yearsolder, on average, than the Amazon health plan enrollees, thatcould account for most of the difference between benefits costs forKaiser Permanente and Amazon.

That implies that, at this point, with Kaiser Permanente's help,Amazon may be about as effective as Kaiser Permanente's ownbenefits managers at managing health benefits, but that it mightnot yet have any secret benefits management sauce that KaiserPermanente lacks.