By JEFF GOLDSMITH
It has occurred at the least a dozen instances. I point out John Arnold and am greeted by educated healthcare colleagues with a clean stare. Houston billionaire John Arnold is probably 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 fuel dealer at Enron in his early twenties. Arnold, who performed no position 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.
Tired of investing and by then a multi-billionaire, Arnold shut down Centaurus in 2012, and determined to alter the world. Along 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’ll discover extra absolutely under, in 2019, Arnold transformed their basis to a ”for-profit charity” generally known as Arnold Ventures. At practically $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 business model is fundamentally different than these legacy charitable foundations.
Arnold Ventures, the guardian, is a for-profit enterprise with restricted monetary disclosure necessities. It has two important subsidiaries, the Laura and John Arnold Basis, a conventional 501c3 and the Motion Now Initiative, a 501c4 non-profit, which funds community- primarily based coverage advocacy. Arnold’s for-profit guardian makes political marketing campaign contributions and funds class motion lawsuits towards 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 centered coverage analysis agenda than it’s to a conventional basis. As Arnold himself stated in protection of the pliability their construction creates: “If we wish to assault a problem, we’ll do no matter it takes.”
Arnold Ventures has an audacious policy agenda spanning a broad vary of home points: legal justice, housing, vitamin, 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 charter schools, but additionally research integrity, by the Reproducibility Mission and the Middle for Open Science, searching for 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 through the Trump period. Whereas Arnold’s agenda is broadly progressive, advocating for heightened authorities activism, Arnold’ advocacy has additionally funded initiatives at American Enterprise Institute, Oren Cass’s libertarian undertaking American Compass and Brian Blase’s Paragon Well being Institute. You’ll find all of Arnold Ventures 990s itemizing their analysis funding actions here courtesy of ProPublica.
Nonetheless, its sprawling healthcare agenda seems to eat a big fraction of its undertaking funding. In 2017, Arnold employed Mark Miller, who was for fifteen years Govt Director of MedPac, the Congressional coverage advisory physique overseeing the Medicare program. Miller introduced with him what was known as a primo Rolodex of contacts within the well being providers analysis group, 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 one in every of these distinguished researchers stated to me when requested about what Arnold was searching for, “If you wish to make conflict on the medical-industrial advanced, Arnold is your man”.
An extended listing runs into dozens of youthful and fewer well-known well being analysis students that characterize the following era 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 akin to JAMA, New England Journal of Medication and Well being Affairs. As a refugee from academia, I can inform you that it’s a must to work onerous to call leaders in well being providers analysis who has not been funded by Arnold.
Within the spirit of vertical integration, Arnold has additionally generously funded a powerful 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 Approach, 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 Price Institute, the Nationwide Convention of State Legislatures and the Lown Institute.
These organizations are key elements of the Arnold coverage “ecosystem”, as a result of they each amplify and legitimize the writings of Arnold Ventures grantees and/or manage conferences the place Arnold funded specialists acquire entry to normal media. You just about must have been hiding below rock to keep away from being showered with Arnold Ventures-funded content material, typically 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 traditional progressive playbook.
We take a more in-depth have 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 personal substack
