JPMorgan Is Still Trying to Fix Health Care

An ambitious partnership with Amazon and Berkshire Hathaway fizzled, but the biggest US bank is giving it another shot—this time on its own

-  John Tozzi

Bill Wulf was in a meeting when he missed a call from Jamie Dimon. As an internist and boss of a medical group in Columbus, Ohio, Wulf doesn’t often hear from the commanding heights of the US economy. But when he rang back, the JPMorgan Chase & Co. chief executive officer immediately got on the line. Wulf’s group had been involved in Haven, a venture led by JPMorgan, Amazon.com and Berkshire Hathaway that aimed to fix American health care with better technology and simplified benefits. But the project had flopped, and Dimon wanted to understand where it had gone wrong.

“Why did we fail? What happened in Columbus?” Wulf recalls Dimon asking in the call two years ago. The city is the bank’s second-biggest US employment hub, behind only New York, making it a crucial proving ground for Haven. Wulf told Dimon that the effort had moved too slowly. A virtual-care program, for instance, had attracted just 150 people in Ohio before the companies pulled the plug. Dimon was undeterred: “We want to do this again,” he told Wulf.

For decades, corporate America has poured money into a healthcare system that costs more each year without improving workers’ health. JPMorgan’s bill is about $1.5 billion for its 270,000 employees and their families worldwide, and the workers kick in $500 million more. Dimon, in his annual letter to shareholders this year, called the complexity of health care “staggering.”