In the end, maybe it’s inevitable that the solution to America’s health-care crisis won’t come from government, business, or academia, but from the charitable impulses of billionaires.

Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett, and Jamie Dimon announced January 30th they’re throwing their wealth, power, and influence behind a new enterprise to provide the employees of their businesses with cheap and effective health care.

As wealth inequality reaches unprecedented levels, we are increasingly looking to the world’s billionaires to save us and our broken institutions.

Decades of expanding the reach of the US government for the benefit of ordinary Americans has given way to a steady erosion in its ambition and faith in its power to help. Private wealth built America’s universities, hospitals, libraries, and museums, as the Rockefellers, Carnegies, and Mellons used their largesse to ensure their legacies and launder their reputations. That era ended in 1913, with the introduction of the income tax. As money flowed to the government, the government expanded and stitched together programs to help and protect Americans.

Philanthropy can be a powerful force. It can move faster and more decisively than governments, and put its money in places no business can consider. Charity has educated millions and treated the illnesses of billions. Still, philanthropy’s strengths are also its weakness. It’s unaccountable and undemocratic. It’s money flows to its donor’s priorities, not society’s needs. And the more muscular philanthropy becomes, the more reliant governments become on its generosity.

Read the full article about billionaire philanthropy by Oliver Staley at Quartz.