According to Reuters, Dr. Atul Gawande, a surgeon who was named this week to head the company being formed by Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan Chase to trim employee healthcare costs,  cited surgery as the single biggest U.S. healthcare cost and said there are ways to both cut costs and improve patient care. 

Gawande, 52, is a surgeon, writer and public health thought leader and practices general and endocrine surgery at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.  He is also a professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Harvard Medical School and founding executive director of the health systems innovation center, Ariadne Labs. Gawande also is a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine and author of four books on health care.

End-of-life care needs to take into account the wishes of patients, something which he said is now sorely lacking.