Three corporate giants seeking to attack rising health care costs have turned to a Harvard professor who has written books about the system’s many flaws.
Amazon, JPMorgan Chase and Berkshire Hathaway have named Dr. Atul Gawande CEO of a venture the companies announced earlier this year: an independent company focused on improving the care delivered to their employees while doing a better job of managing the expense.
Health care researchers have said any solutions produced by this new undertaking will spread well beyond the estimated 1 million workers the three companies employ in the United States. Businesses that provide employee health coverage are eager to find solutions for costs that have been squeezing their budgets for years.
Berkshire Chairman and CEO Warren Buffett has described health costs as a “hungry tapeworm on the American economy.” And the leaders of the three companies see a lot they want to fix, even though they have said little yet about how that will be done.
“We said at the outset that the degree of difficulty is high and success is going to require an expert’s knowledge, a beginner’s mind, and a long-term orientation,” Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said in a statement Wednesday. “(Gawande) embodies all three, and we’re starting strong as we move forward in this challenging and worthwhile endeavor.”
JPMorgan Chairman and CEO Jamie Dimon outlined several priorities for the new venture in an April letter to shareholders. He said it will look for ways to help employees make better choices for their care and give them the best options available. It will develop better wellness programs, particularly focused on obesity and smoking, which account for chronic diseases like cancer, heart disease and depression.
Dimon said the new company also will study why some costly and specialized medicines are often over- or under-utilized and the “extraordinary” amount of money spent on often unwanted care at the end of a patient’s life.