Haven Can Wait: Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, JPMorgan Can’t Figure Out Healthcare
If you haven’t heard the news then let me fill you in:
Haven Health, sparked by an idea from JPMorgan Chief Executive Jamie Dimon and supported Jeff Bezos and Berkshire’s Warren Buffett, sought to “transform health care” and reduce costs for hundreds of thousands of workers at the three companies by pooling resources and technology.
The joint venture, which was announced in 2018 with expectations high enough to push down major insurers’ shares, will cease operations in February without having achieved those aims.
Haven’s transformative ambitions proved too difficult to achieve, according to people familiar with the matter. Its shutdown attests to the challenges of making sweeping changes to the U.S. health-care system and of bringing innovations to hundreds of thousands of employees around the country working at different companies, the people said.
Can you imagine how hard it is to transform healthcare when these three powerhouses couldn’t do it? Let me add another name to the mix. Harvard University professor Atul Gawande was named Haven’s chief executive and he resigned in May to help the pandemic (yeah, right).
As much as I want to comment on this failed attempt, I really can’t. No one really knows what they did or how much they spent. We can assume it was a sh%t ton of money. Wouldn’t it be nice for them to open up and show how and why they failed so that we can learn from it?
I still believe that the free market is the answer to fixing our health care system ill. Direct Primary Care has proven this over and over again. It sure would have been nice if Haven had worked with us DPC docs or at least picked our brains.
What do you think? Does this mean private enterprise can’t pull this off? Is government the answer?
“transform health care”
Those three words are a perfect recipe for failure.
Who didn’t see this coming?
I would imagine their problem was how to provide quality healthcare cheaply AND pay their executives million-dollar-a-year salaries.
While I do not think that government involvement ever helps anything, I am concerned that pure free enterprise will correct things as well. I practice DPC in western Ky. I have made some inroads with care around here but they are few and fleeting. People can’t seem to let go of the old way of thinking (insurance only) and embrace my model. I am not sure how to get the word out anymore than I have without sounding like a zealot. I have reached out to businesses and employers with only 2 small companies taking me up on my offer. Part of the government problem is Kentucky Medicaid. They offer a backward, bureaucratic monstrosity that ropes in the poor and allows them no alternative to care. I am not a medicaid provider so I am no allowed to order tests or prescribe meds. This cuts out a significant population of people. They cannot afford a monthly fee and then not be able to get a CT if needed. It is very frustrating.