Boston will be home to a new healthcare company with some pretty big names behind it: Amazon's Jeff Bezos, Berkshire Hathaway's Warren Buffett and JPMorgan's Jamie Dimon.
The trio, who announced the venture earlier this year, said on Wednesday that the Boston-based company will be led by Dr. Atul Gawande, a general and endocrine surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and a professor at Harvard Medical School.
Dr. Gawande will take the reins of the venture as CEO on July 9. As a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1998, he recently entertained the question "Is healthcare a right?" in a piece for the magazine. "Some people see rights as protections provided by government," he wrote. "But others [...] see rights as protections from government."
Also, Dr. Gawande is the author of New York Times bestseller Being Mortal, a personal meditation on "the modern experience of mortality." In his Twitter bio, he describes himself as a "surgeon, writer, researcher, dilettante."
The new company, which in the beginning will pursue an effort to give Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan Chase employees better options on health care, will operate as an independent entity that is "free from profit-making incentives and constraints," according to a press release.
In January, the three corporate giants said that the initial focus of the new company will be on "technology solutions" to provide U.S. employees and their families with simplified and transparent healthcare.
At that time, Dimon, chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, pointed out that the effort could potentially be expanded to benefit all Americans.
