Headlines latch on to 5% and $20k, leadings numbers from the 200+ page annual Kaiser Employer Health Benefits Survey. Forbes, NYT, Bloomberg, Health Affairs, and the WSJ all take this angle. The press is warranted. Healthcare costs continue to grow at 2x inflation and annual premiums for family coverage crossed $20,000, more than a mortgage…
Category: Industry Trends
September’s Index
This month’s index, inspired by the Harpers index, touches on charity care, gross margins, stock valuation metrics for three healthcare firms, sample UK health costs, algorithms, machine learning, and big data (just kidding on the last 3). The cost of charity and other uncompensated care as a percentage of total revenue at HCA hospitals in…
Healthcare Alpha
Discerning luck from skill can be hard. Baseball has 162 games per season. Boring for some but more than enough games for randomness to average out. How telling is one game? How telling is one case study? It could be random or just cherry picked. It’s the consistent rate attributable to skill that we’re after,…
Will Software Eat Healthcare?
In 2011, the legendary venture capitalist Mark Andreessen wrote why software is eating the world. Efficiency and scale could cut the costs of servers and development by 100x+. Entertainment (Netflix, Disney), cars (all), retail (Amazon), job hunting (LinkedIn), and more, all have software as integral parts of the product and value. This view has held….
Surprise Bills Shake Firms’ Debt
Bond markets, while boring and somewhat aloof for most people, are a source of early signals and key news. When bond investors make big moves to discount a specific bond’s price, be careful (as they say in Mexico, aguas). Such is the fate of a few private equity owned healthcare companies. This week the FT…
Why Margins Matter
If you subscribe to Fortune, you’re likely surprised and excited by the heft of the issue on the biggest 500 firms. It’s a formidable group: $23T in market value, 29 million global employees, and over $1T in profit. With covers to sell, a cursory look focuses on revenue. But man cannot live by revenue alone….
Could Healthcare Be Like Lasik?
Lasik is odd in at least two ways. It’s in a rare deflationary healthcare category. It’s also awkwardly priced at an average of $2,000 per eye. “Shoes for sale, $50 per shoe.” That aside, could healthcare be more like Lasik, shoppable and/or deflationary? There are key differences. There are more options in your city for…
Hedging Healthcare
The history of the English landscape garden is one of luxury. Rain is abundant but there’s the opportunity cost of the land, walls of needy hedges, lawns to cut, and sweat. All throughout England, hedges or hedgerows, mark the landscapes. They were also developed as mounds of dirt topped with bushes to act as a…
JP Morgan’s $100 Million
At the center of this 1918 picture is John Pierpont Morgan, JP Morgan, the founder of the eponymous firm (now JPMorgan Chase & Co.) who helped bail out the US government during the panic of 1893. I wish I could say the photobombing kid was my grandpa. That would be a great family story. Today…
On Tailwinds
Anyone who wants to understand business should read Warren Buffett’s letters*. All of them. Even his partnership ones when he was in his 30s. I read them about 10 years ago, and continue to intellectually salivate near the end of February when a new one is published. They’re especially an interesting respite and cross-disciplinary perspective…