How much do healthcare costs matter to companies’ earnings? Relative to earnings they’re larger than many think. 24%. That’s the median estimated healthcare costs as a percentage of earnings for the S&P 1000 (the lesser-known index sibling of the S&P 500). I ran an analysis of data from S&P 1000 firms and filtered for those…
Category: Thought Leadership
Amazon’s Health Benefits
Last year I posted a question on Quora asking what healthcare benefits and cost sharing were like at Google. A few answers of the “it’s private” or “No, I can’t say” variety soon surfaced. They have sense been oddly scrubbed from the site. Why the secrecy? Rich benefits are a given at Google. Time spent…
The Survey Says…
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…
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,…