“We’ve been asked to solve a very big problem, which is to figure out new ways of health care,” John C. Stoddard, a senior executive for the new venture, testified. The three employers combined are spending about $4 billion a year on the roughly one million people they cover. But employees “have a poor experience. They’re not getting the care they need, and the costs continue to rise,” he said.
“We wouldn’t exist unless there was a need to come up with and find a new solution to the problem,” Mr. Stoddard said.
The venture, which has no name and fewer than 20 employees, plans to tackle several areas, including how benefits are provided through traditional health insurance plans, Mr. Stoddard said. High deductibles, which force employees to pay for significant amounts of their care before their insurance kicks in, are a hardship for “fulfillment-center workers and call-center workers,” he said.
The companies also want to see if they can lower the cost of drugs for chronic conditions. In his testimony, Mr. Stoddard insisted that the new venture had no plans to enter the pharmacy business but wanted to better understand the process and the actual cost of drugs. “That doesn’t make us a competitor,” he said. “That makes us a very informed customer.”
The employers also want to make it easier for workers to see a doctor, Mr. Stoddard testified. Because Optum also operates a large network of primary-care doctors, the venture might want to work with Optum to provide employees with easier access to physicians. “That’s why this is so crazy to me: that they think of us as competitors, when I see us as potential partners,” Mr. Stoddard said.
Like other large employers, the companies also want to see if they can make better use of doctor and hospital data and identify where employees can go for better care at lower prices.
The venture plans to conduct a series of experiments to test new approaches for smaller groups of employees with various partners, including Optum, Mr. Stoddard said.
But while Mr. Stoddard would not rule out the possibility that the venture could be a competitor, he emphasized that it had a different purpose. Unlike Optum, which he described as trying to “maximize profits,” the new organization is “trying to create value for families who are trying to use the health care system,” he said.
