By JEFF GOLDSMITH
It has occurred no less than a dozen instances. I point out John Arnold and am greeted by educated healthcare colleagues with a clean stare. Houston billionaire John Arnold is essentially the most highly effective man in US healthcare that no person has ever heard of. An investing savant, Arnold made $50k in highschool buying and selling collectors’ hockey playing cards over the Web. He turned the star pure gasoline dealer at Enron in his early twenties. Arnold, who performed no function no matter in Enron’s storied collapse, left the corporate in 2001 with an $8 million bonus. In 2002, at age 28, Arnold based a hedge fund, Centaurus Advisors, specializing in power investing, and reeled off a decade of 100% annual returns.
Uninterested in investing and by then a multi-billionaire, Arnold shut down Centaurus in 2012, and determined to alter the world. Together with his Yale educated legal professional spouse Laura, John created a household basis. and funded it with a big share of their private wealth. For causes we are going to discover extra totally under, in 2019, Arnold transformed their basis to a ”for-profit charity” often known as Arnold Ventures. At almost $4.7 billion in property in 2024, Arnold Ventures was a couple of third of the scale of the lions in basis world, Robert Wooden Johnson ($14.7 billion in 2023) and Ford ($13.7 billion in 2024). Arnold Ventures 501c3 grantmaking subsidiary gave away a cool $194 million in 2024 to a bewildering array of grantees from American Enterprise Institute to Households USA.
However Arnold’s enterprise mannequin is essentially totally different than these legacy charitable foundations.
Arnold Ventures, the mother or father, is a for-profit enterprise with restricted monetary disclosure necessities. It has two fundamental subsidiaries, the Laura and John Arnold Basis, a standard 501c3 and the Motion Now Initiative, a 501c4 non-profit, which funds community- primarily based coverage advocacy. Arnold’s for-profit mother or father makes political marketing campaign contributions and funds class motion lawsuits in opposition to coverage targets, which funding just isn’t disclosed as to targets or quantities. Thus, Arnold Ventures is definitely nearer to a diversified political motion committee/public curiosity lobbyist with a targeted coverage analysis agenda than it’s to a standard basis. As Arnold himself stated in protection of the flexibleness their construction creates: “If we wish to assault a problem, we are going to do no matter it takes.”
Arnold Ventures has an audacious coverage agenda spanning a broad vary of home points: prison justice, housing, diet, infrastructure growth (e.g. pipelines and {the electrical} grid), substance abuse, tax coverage, schooling, retirement coverage and healthcare. A few of its earliest advocacy was on behalf of constitution colleges, but in addition analysis integrity, via the Reproducibility Venture and the Middle for Open Science, in search of to find out if analysis findings are literally actual, or whether or not industrial pursuits have filtered what reaches the general public from the laboratory bench.
It’s troublesome to pin Arnold’s agenda down on the ideological spectrum. Arnold was a significant donor to each Obama campaigns and has seemingly gone to floor throughout the Trump period. Whereas Arnold’s agenda is broadly progressive, advocating for heightened authorities activism, Arnold’ advocacy has additionally funded tasks at American Enterprise Institute, Oren Cass’s libertarian challenge American Compass and Brian Blase’s Paragon Well being Institute. You could find all of Arnold Ventures 990s itemizing their analysis funding actions right here courtesy of ProPublica.
Nevertheless, its sprawling healthcare agenda seems to devour a big fraction of its challenge funding. In 2017, Arnold employed Mark Miller, who was for fifteen years Government Director of MedPac, the Congressional coverage advisory physique overseeing the Medicare program. Miller introduced with him what was once referred to as a primo Rolodex of contacts within the well being companies analysis neighborhood, and has devoted the final eight years to showering his colleagues with Arnold Ventures funding. The most important beneficiaries of Arnold’s well being coverage funding reside, not surprisingly, on the nation’s elite Universities.
ARNOLD VENTURES HEALTH POLICY GRANT ACTIVITY AT SELECT UNIVERSITIES 2020-2025
Supply: ProPublica Non-Revenue Explorer, 2026
The brief listing of well being coverage specialists Arnold has funded is star-studded: Michael Chernew (Harvard College and present MedPac Chair) , David Cutler, (additionally Harvard), Jamie Robinson, (UC Berkeley), Paul Ginsberg and Glenn Melnick (USC), Larry Casalino (Cornell), Amy Finkelstein (MIT), Gerard Anderson and Ge Bai (Johns Hopkins), Roslyn Murray and Chris Whaley (Brown), and Zack Cooper (Yale). As considered one of these distinguished researchers stated to me when requested about what Arnold was in search of, “If you wish to make struggle on the medical-industrial complicated, Arnold is your man”.
An extended listing runs into dozens of youthful and fewer well-known well being analysis students that characterize the following technology of movers and shakers in well being coverage. Arnold’s attain is broad sufficient to exert a pervasive affect on the pool of peer reviewers of well being coverage papers for main journals equivalent to JAMA, New England Journal of Medication and Well being Affairs. As a refugee from academia, I can inform you that you need to work laborious to call leaders in well being companies analysis who has not been funded by Arnold.
Within the spirit of vertical integration, Arnold has additionally generously funded a formidable array of healthcare foundations, non-profits and media shops that publicize Arnold funded findings: Well being Affairs, Kaiser Well being Information and the Kaiser Household Basis, Academy Well being, ProPublica, Third Means, the Rand Company, the Nationwide Bureau of Financial Analysis, the Nationwide Affiliation of State Well being Coverage, Altarum Institute, Brookings Establishment, the Well being Care Value Institute, the Nationwide Convention of State Legislatures and the Lown Institute.
These organizations are key components of the Arnold coverage “ecosystem”, as a result of they each amplify and legitimize the writings of Arnold Ventures grantees and/or set up conferences the place Arnold funded specialists achieve entry to normal media. You just about must have been hiding underneath rock to keep away from being showered with Arnold Ventures-funded content material, usually with out attribution, within the well-orchestrated post-publication media protection!
In referring to his early work on scientific integrity a decade in the past, Arnold posted on X, “’A brand new examine reveals’ . . . are the 4 most harmful phrases.” But in its personal coverage agenda, Arnold appears keenly conscious that “A New Research by .. . elite College scholar title goes right here . . .” is an virtually irresistible publicity magnet. By attaching elite college investigators’ manufacturers to its coverage agenda, it has adopted the basic progressive playbook.
We take a better take a look at how this course of works in Half II of this Report.
Jeff Goldsmith is a veteran well being care futurist, President of Well being Futures Inc and common THCB Contributor. This comes from his private substack
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