Time Magazine's Most Influential Companies
On May 24, 2023, Time carried an article by Donald Berwick and Michelle Williams stating “American health care is broken. And American health care systems must transform radically to lead the repair.”
On June 21, 2023, Time published its issue highlighting the 100 most influential companies in the U.S. Time considered CVS one of these top 100 companies. In it’s showcase of CVS’s accomplishments, the reporter Jamie Ducharme opened her writeup with the quote from CVS’s chief medical officer:
“Health care is broken,” says CVS Health’s chief medical officer Dr. Sree Chaguturu—and his company wants to put it back together.”
Ducharme continues:
“Over the past year the drugstore chain lead by CEO Karen Lynch has dropped close to 20 billion on acquisitions of Oak Street Health, a senior-focused primary-care network and Signify Health, a home-health-care provider. Between those deals, its 2018 acquisition of the health insurer Aetna and the continued expansion of the MinuteClinic walk-in care brand, which now operates in more than 1100 locations nationwide, CVS has cemented its role as a player in in nearly every aspect of US healthcare.”
DuCharme doesn’t tell us how these acquisitions have put healthcare back together. I’m not suggesting DuCharme’s reporting is not factually correct. CVS is gobbling up this and that all over the place in the healthcare industry. Most anyone will tell you healthcare is broken. But the details of how this influential company is actually fixing what’s broken isn’t described in the article. Nor does CVS’s chief medical officer report how CVS is doing this.
CVS is just another one of the 10 or so large companies who make billions of dollars every year on consumer healthcare. Ms. Lynch, CEO, has a total annual take-home compensation of about $22, 000,000. Now exactly what does she do for that money and what does her board of directors do to justify such takings?
Hospital and clinic CEOs have reinvented themselves. They now call themselves “healthcare leaders.” True, the salaries of our so-called "healthcare leaders" did not all amount to the $22 million Karen Lynch gets, but in many cases the amount is several million dollars. The company board justification for these CEO salaries is they are “worth it,” and the hospital or clinic must “remain competitive.” Really? How about explaining just how exorbitant CEO salaries helps companies remain competitive.
With patients losing their houses to pay for their cancer treatments, these salaries are increasingly offensive, and they are in NO WAY part of the solution. So, when Dr. Sree Chaguturu “wants to put it back together,” he gives no details on how CVS is doing this.
A few years ago, I talked with a Good Sam nursing home director. She said her nursing home made a lot of money, and she would have no trouble running it, except for the tithe, the exorbitant amount of money that had to go to the “mother-house,” to pay salaries for non-essential managers. Today many rural and urban hospitals are struggling to make ends meet with salaries being cut, especially doctor’s salaries, while the “health leader” CEO cuts staff salaries and increases salaries of administrators.
As I wrote in my previous Substack post, CVS bought Aetna in the fall of 2018 for $75 billion. The Time article by Jamie DuCharme indicates that they bought MinuteClinic, for another $20 billion. They also spent another $20 billion for Oak Street Health, a senior-based primary care network and Signify Health, an at-home healthcare provider.
Where did the $115 million come from? They got it from you, the public. While all of this money-making is harmful to medical care and the public in general, it is most harmful to the individual.
As a result of this so called “merger” the Department of Justice (DOJ) was carrying water for Big Pharma. At the same time, the DOJ put CVS into a position to carry water for Aetna’s pharmacy benefits manager (PBM), exactly the organization the PBM is supposed to be watching. Why did the DOJ, which is supposed to prevent this kind of destructive merger, actually grace it with their approval? After all, Dr. Sree Chaguturu implies this kind of innovation is fixing the broken healthcare system, or so it seems.
To my mind, CVS’s promoting buying the company that is supposed to oversee their medications as “innovation” is a travesty. But obviously CVS’s public relations putting out constant assertions about their “innovation” in healthcare has been effective. The DOJ bought it without asking for specifics on how this is fixing our broken healthcare system.
As a reporter, DuCharme should have asked CVS for specifics about its assertions that its mergers were “innovative” and CVS was “fixing the broken healthcare system.” Time didn’t seem to think it was important to actually ask CVS to document their claims.
Public relations gurus waving empty terms around repeatedly is a long-established ploy of propaganda. That is precisely how the undocumented terms such as “health care innovator” and “we’re fixing the broken healthcare system” or more accurately, the “misinformation,” become fact.