Amazon’s Haven set to disband

It was the venture set to reinvent employer-sponsored health care, even before it had a name. But Haven, the much-touted partnership between Amazon, JPMorgan Chase and Berkshire Hathaway, has announced it will be disbanding after only three years.

As reported by CNBC, the company will close its doors by the end of next month, with its 57 workers to be reassigned amongst the ranks of each of the three companies. The plan is to continue to push for health care reform on an individual level, with informal collaboration.

″The Haven team made good progress exploring a wide range of health care solutions, as well as piloting new ways to make primary care easier to access, insurance benefits simpler to understand and easier to use, and prescription drugs more affordable,” Brooke Thurston, a spokeswoman for Haven, said in an email to CNBC.

“Moving forward, Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, and JPMorgan Chase & Co. will leverage these insights and continue to collaborate informally to design programs tailored to address the specific needs of our individual employee populations and locations,” she added.

Though the news is a bit of a surprise, there were signs that the venture was not living up to the hype. The partnership has failed to make a splash in the health care space in the past three years; its most notable move was the introduction of a new health insurance plan in partnership with Cigna and Aetna–not exactly the innovative new solution the industry was expecting.

In May, Haven also lost its CEO, Atul Gawande, who stepped back to focus on policy and advocacy and will be serving as a key figure on President-elect Joe Biden’s coronavirus task force.

For its part, Amazon has been making significant strides in the health care space, both as an employer and a supplier of goods and services. The retail giant is rumored to be courting other employers for its digital health care service, Amazon Care, and also launched its online pharmacy service this past fall.

Read more: 

• Amazon getting into the brick-and-mortar health center game
• Amazon and health care: Are you scared yet?
• Amazon & Co. venture finally has a name: Haven