SEATTLE — An ambitious effort by three of America’s most prominent companies and their high-powered executives to overhaul health care in the United States will shut down next month with little to show for their efforts.
Haven, created by Amazon, JPMorgan Chase and Berkshire Hathaway to addresses soaring health care costs and improve patient outcomes, announced it will shutter in a terse statement on its website Monday.
“Moving forward, Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, and JPMorgan Chase & Co. will leverage these insights and continue to collaborate informally to design programs tailored to address the specific needs of their own employee populations,” the company wrote. “Haven will end its independent operations at the end of February 2021.”
It’s a stark shift from the ambitious announcement of the group’s creation three years ago, announced by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon and Berkshire’s Warren Buffett.
“The ballooning costs of healthcare act as a hungry tapeworm on the American economy. Our group does not come to this problem with answers. But we also do not accept it as inevitable,” Buffett said in a statement at the time.
Haven had an ambitious 2018 debut, when the three prominent executives put their names behind the effort, garnering massive media coverage for their efforts to address one of the most difficult challenges in corporate America. Reducing costs was a focus.
“Our nation’s health care costs are essentially twice as much per person vs. most other developed nations,” Dimon said at the time.
Health-care spending increased by 4.6 percent in 2019, after growing 4.7 percent in 2018, according to an analysis published in Health Affairs, a health-policy journal. The nation spent $3.8 trillion on health care in 2019, accounting for 17.7 percent of the nation’s gross GDP, compared with 17.6 percent in 2018.
The company also chose Atul Gawande, a practicing surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and a writer for the New Yorker magazine, as its chief executive in 2018. At the time, Gawande said “the backing of these remarkable organizations” provided the opportunity to “incubate better models of care for all.”
Gawande stepped away from Haven last spring. In December, President-elect Joe Biden named Gawande to his coronavirus advisory board.
JPMorgan declined to say how much it spend on Haven, except to note that the costs were “immaterial,” spokesman Joseph Evangelisti said in an email. In a letter to employees, JPMorgan’s Dimon pledged to build on Haven’s accomplishments, even though he did not detail them.
“Haven worked best as an incubator of ideas, a place to pilot, test and learn – and a way to share best practices across our companies,” Dimon wrote. “Our learnings have been invaluable, and I look forward to working with all of you as we seek to make healthcare better, simpler and more affordable for all.”
Representatives for Amazon and Berkshire did not immediately comment.
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