Amazon, Berkshire, JPMorgan Closing Down Joint Healthcare Venture
January 4, 2021 by
Manas Mishra
The healthcare joint venture of Amazon.com Inc., Berkshire Hathaway Inc. and JPMorgan Chase & Co., will cease to exist at the end of February, it said on Monday.
The move comes three years after the companies came together to form Haven to address the rising healthcare cost in the United States.
The company had said in May last year that its Chief Executive Officer Atul Gawande, a Harvard surgeon and author, will step down and take the role of chairman.
3 Giants – Berkshire, Amazon, JPMorgan- to Form Joint Employee Health VentureJPMorgan, Amazon, Berkshire Venture to Target Health Issues Using Data, TechnologyStatement from Haven: “In the past three years, Haven explored a wide range of healthcare solutions, as well as piloted new ways to make primary care easier to access, insurance benefits simpler to understand and easier to use, and prescription drugs more affordable. 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. Haven will end its independent operations at the end of February 2021.”
The announcement to form the company shook the shares of health insurance companies such as UnitedHealth Group Inc. and Cigna Corp. that manage large corporate benefits on worries that Amazon would disrupt the traditional insurance and drug benefit businesses.
CNBC, which first reported that Haven will disband, also reported that many of the Boston-based company’s 57 workers are expected to be placed at Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway or JPMorgan Chase.
(Reporting by Manas Mishra in Bengaluru; Editing by Arun Koyyur)