By JEFF GOLDSMITH
It has occurred a minimum of a dozen instances. I point out John Arnold and am greeted by educated healthcare colleagues with a clean stare. Houston billionaire John Arnold is essentially the most highly effective man in US healthcare that no one 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.
Uninterested in investing and by then a multi-billionaire, Arnold shut down Centaurus in 2012, and determined to vary the world. Together 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 beneath, in 2019, Arnold transformed their basis to a ”for-profit charity” often known as Arnold Ventures. At almost $4.7 billion in property in 2024, Arnold Ventures was a few 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 dad or mum, is a for-profit enterprise with restricted monetary disclosure necessities. It has two predominant subsidiaries, the Laura and John Arnold Basis, a conventional 501c3 and the Motion Now Initiative, a 501c4 non-profit, which funds community- based mostly coverage advocacy. Arnold’s for-profit dad or mum makes political marketing campaign contributions and funds class motion lawsuits in opposition to coverage targets, which funding will not be 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 need to assault a difficulty, we’ll do no matter it takes.”
Arnold Ventures has an audacious policy agenda spanning a broad vary of home points: felony justice, housing, vitamin, infrastructure growth (e.g. pipelines and {the electrical} grid), substance abuse, tax coverage, training, retirement coverage and healthcare. A few of its earliest advocacy was on behalf of charter schools, but additionally research integrity, by way of the Reproducibility Undertaking and the Heart for Open Science, in search of to find out if analysis findings are literally actual, or whether or not business pursuits have filtered what reaches the general public from the laboratory bench.
It’s tough to pin Arnold’s agenda down on the ideological spectrum. Arnold was a serious donor to each Obama campaigns and has seemingly gone to floor throughout the Trump period. Whereas Arnold’s agenda is broadly progressive, advocating for heightened authorities activism, Arnold’ advocacy has additionally funded tasks at American Enterprise Institute, Oren Cass’s libertarian venture American Compass and Brian Blase’s Paragon Well being Institute. You could find all of Arnold Ventures 990s itemizing their analysis funding actions here courtesy of ProPublica.
Nonetheless, its sprawling healthcare agenda seems to devour a big fraction of its venture funding. In 2017, Arnold employed Mark Miller, who was for fifteen years Government 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 largest 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 quick checklist of well being coverage consultants 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 all these distinguished researchers stated to me when requested about what Arnold was searching for, “If you wish to make warfare on the medical-industrial advanced, Arnold is your man”.
An extended checklist runs into dozens of youthful and fewer well-known well being analysis students that symbolize the following technology 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 Drugs and Well being Affairs. As a refugee from academia, I can inform you that you need to work laborious 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 formidable 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 Means, 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 Value Institute, the Nationwide Convention of State Legislatures and the Lown Institute.
These organizations are key components of the Arnold coverage “ecosystem”, as a result of they each amplify and legitimize the writings of Arnold Ventures grantees and/or arrange conferences the place Arnold funded consultants achieve entry to common media. You just about need to 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 research exhibits’ . . . are the 4 most harmful phrases.” But in its personal coverage agenda, Arnold appears keenly conscious that “A New Examine 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
