It’s tempting to see Haven as another casualty of entrenched interests in American medicine. But the endeavor, however ambitious, also collided with the equally unmovable aims of Amazon, whose sweeping campaign to disrupt health care began long before it formed Haven with Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan Chase in 2018.
Amazon beat Haven to the punch on one of its core initiatives, an effort to develop a digital product to streamline access to primary care and prescriptions for employees. Even though Amazon Care was initially confined to Amazon office workers in Seattle, its launch in September 2019 blindsided several rank-and-file employees at the startup who were struck by similarities to the product they had been building.
