Amazon partnership targets health care for its low-wage workers
An Amazon partnership is looking at health care solutions for warehouse and call center workers.
Called Haven, the Boston-based partnership between Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway and JP Morgan Chase, will manage $4 billion in health care spending for the partners' one million employees and dependents.
The partnership's business plans came to light from unsealed court documents about a company called ABC — now Haven. It's been operating less than a year.
A judge in Boston unsealed the testimony several weeks ago in a case about whether a Haven executive violated his contract with his employer, UnitedHealth Group’s Optum platform, when he jumped to Haven.
Amazon chief operating officer John Stoddard argued the companies do not compete with one another: “They are focused on selling products to as many employers as possible,” he said. "We are focused on improving the outcomes for our employers.”
Stoddard told a court warehouse and call center workers often have high-deductible insurance that they struggle to afford and understand.
"Can we re-invent what insurance looks like in terms of benefit design?" Stoddard said. He discussed testing whether a redesigned insurance plan actually worked. "Did people go to get primary care, were they able to stay on their medications?"
Health insurance complexity is one of Haven's first targets.
“We are looking at all ranges of complexity: why it’s hard to get primary care, why its costs are very difficult to understand, why health insurance is so complicated, why big employers have invested all this money and the experience is still not great for their employees, why they’re frustrated, why their costs continue to rise. These are big problems that our founders have asked us to look at,” Stoddard said.
Haven says its job is not to show profits, but instead to improve health outcomes for workers and for employers. It is currently limited to the three partner employers, but in testimony, Stoddard said that could change.
