Bezos, Buffett, Dimon Health Venture Will Be Based In Boston
The new health care company being formed by billionaire investor Warren Buffett, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, and JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon will be based in Boston and will be led by author and Brigham and Women’s Hospital surgeon Dr. Atul Gawande, the group announced Wednesday.
Gawande, a well-known New Yorker writer and a winner of a MacArthur “genius” grant, was named chief executive of the company that aims to fix the health care system.
A statement touted the entity as being “independent” and “free from profit-making incentives and constraints,” but did not give specifics about where it will be located in the city or what its exact mission would be.
In January, Bezos said that the project would attempt to improve health care for the hundreds of thousands of employees of the men’s companies, and, possibly, the country, STAT has reported.
“I’m thrilled to be named CEO of this health care initiative,” Gawande said Wednesday in a statement. “I have devoted my public health career to building scalable solutions for better health care delivery that are saving lives, reducing suffering, and eliminating wasteful spending both in the US and across the world.”
“Now I have the backing of these remarkable organizations to pursue this mission with even greater impact for more than a million people, and in doing so incubate better models of care for all. This work will take time but must be done,” he said. “The system is broken, and better is possible.”
Donald M. Berwick, former administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services under President Obama, said aides to Buffett, Bezos, and Dimon have spent the last six months talking to experts in health care about their company and about who should lead it.
“Health care is going to have trouble changing itself,” said Berwick, president emeritus of the Cambridge-based Institute for Healthcare Improvement. “It’s generally good-hearted, but costs are far too high and quality is not where it should be But these are three important companies. Now, they’ve picked a CEO who has the imagination and the experience to actually generate new approaches.”
Berwick said the nature of the venture is not yet clear, but he rejected the idea that it’s going to be a well-funded think tank pumping out policy ideas and white papers.
“I think it’s going to be a do-tank,” he said. “It’s an activist move by organizations that really do want to make a change, and they have picked a leader in Atul Gawande who is almost uniquely capable of crafting the changes that are going to be need.”
The January announcement of the new venture by three renowned leaders in technology and finance sent a shock wave through the health care sector, STAT reported. The rising costs of care have been a burden on US companies and they are increasingly dropping coverage or raising costs for workers.
Health care’s ballooning costs “act as a hungry tapeworm on the American economy,” Buffett said. He told Inc. that “I love the idea of tackling what I regard as the major problem of our economy.”
Amazon is particularly well-known for disrupting industries. Beginning with books, it has changed the way Americans buy things, replacing a trip to the store or mall with speedy door-to-door delivery.
Dimon, in his annual letter to shareholders, said the venture would look at issues such as the “extraordinary amount of money” spent on waste, administration, and fraud costs; the way incentives work in the system; empowering employees to make better health care choices; developing better wellness programs; the utilization of costly and specialized medicine; and the cost of end-of-life care.
“To attack these issues, we will be using top management, big data, virtual technology, better customer engagement and the improved creation of customer choice,” he said.
Some health care experts were initially skeptical of the new venture, wondering if it is more sizzle than substance. They’ve pointed to the example of others who have promised, but failed, to fix health care, STAT reported.
Buffett acknowledged in the Inc. article that the challenges are huge and others have failed.
But he said, “I do think we have the right three partners. And the job now is to get the right CEO. That’s an enormously important job and we can’t afford to make a mistake. That is our first and most important order of business.”
Gawande, a prolific writer, is known for his books, “Complications,” “Better,” “The Checklist Manifesto,” and “Being Mortal.”
While he practices general and endocrine surgery at the Brigham and also does public health research, he has been a staff writer for the New Yorker since 1998, according to his website. He has won awards for his writing and, in 2006, was awarded a MacArthur “genius” fellowship.
The foundation, in its award writeup, said he “applied a critical eye to modern surgical practice, articulating its realities, complexities, and challenges, in the interest of improving outcomes and saving lives.”
The foundation said he had scrutinized “the culture, protocol, and technology of modern medical practice.”
It also said he was “energetic and imaginative in the identification of practical changes and solutions,” citing innovations by Gawande, including “bar codes to prevent surgeons from inadvertently leaving sponges and instruments in patients and a simple score of one to ten indicating the likelihood of complications.”
Through a center at the Brigham, the foundation said, “Gawande is giving leadership to the identification of numerous other bold enhancements to surgical protocol that will both improve practice and save lives.
Gawande is no stranger to health care politics and policy. A graduate of Stanford and a Rhodes Scholar who studied philosophy and politics at Oxford, he worked on Al Gore’s failed 1988 presidential campaign, then in Gore’s Senate office and for a Tennessee House member. He became a health care adviser to candidate Bill Clinton in 1992, and, after Clinton was elected, served in his administration, working as a member of Hillary Clinton’s unsuccessful health care reform task force. Gawande left the administration to finish medical school.
Years later, a June 2009 Gawande article in the New Yorker, titled, “The Cost Continuum: What a Texas Town Can Teach Us About Health Care” had an impact in Washington, where President Obama was pondering his own health care reform plan.
Oregon Senator Ron Wyden told the New York Times that Obama set up a strategy session with Wyden and other Senate Democrats shortly after it appeared “and came into the meeting with that article having affected his thinking dramatically.” Wyden said Obama, “in effect, took that article and put it in front of a big group of senators and said, ‘This is what we’ve got to fix.’”
In a 2015 article in the New Yorker, Gawande took a look at the problem of unnecessary medical care, saying it was costing patients, both financially and physically.
“Virtually every family in the country, the research indicates, has been subject to overtesting and overtreatment in one form or another. The costs appear to take thousands of dollars out of the paychecks of every household each year,” he wrote. “Millions of people are receiving drugs that aren’t helping them, operations that aren’t going to make them better, and scans and tests that do nothing beneficial for them, and often cause harm.”