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: Thought Leadership
My Lehman Brothers Experience
In September, 2008 I sat alone sipping a juice in the open town hall area of a Goldman Sachs office. My eyes were fixed on a freshly printed 4-page report from CEO Dick Fuld on the status and future of Lehman Brothers, capital positions, $600B+ in assets, tangible book value per share, value-at-risk, etc. The…
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,…
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…
How Americans Save: The Growth of Target-Date Funds
The premise is simple. Set it and forget it. Vanguard and others offer this approach for target-date retirement funds. Of two investing extremes there is an active self-directed retirement account, where you pick individual stocks and strive to have an edge (fewer than 1 in 200 with Vanguard accounts do this*), and there’s auto-pilot. Target-date…
Part 2: Can Healthcare Cost Move Stocks?
They say a great way to lose money is to open a restaurant. Costs, pricing pressures, and low barriers to entry tend to eat into your capital. Dad pun intended. Food, rent and labor inflation are stubborn and every extra dollar counts. All costs matter. Some restaurants make it work and build lasting brands with…
Lawson’s Laws
We’re in the season of reading and quoting executives. There’s Amazon’s letter from Jeff Bezos on customer-centricity, Jamie Dimon’s on employees, customers, and better regulations, Buffett’s on the tailwinds of America’s economic machine. Jeff Lawson, CEO and co-founder of Twilio, has his own words to add. His company “enables developers to build, scale and operate…
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…
February’s Index
A monthly list of interesting facts and figures from the world of healthcare, finance, and public markets. 2/3: The estimated number of Medicare quality metrics deemed uncertain or invalid by a NEJM study. 25%: the percentage of healthcare costs attributable to the top 1%. 1%: the likelihood of being in the top 10% of healthcare…