By JEFF GOLDSMITH

It is occurred not less than a dozen occasions. I point out John Arnold and am greeted by skilled healthcare colleagues with a clean stare. Houston billionaire John Arnold is essentially the most highly effective man in American healthcare that nobody has ever heard of. Arnold, an investing scholar, made $50,000 buying and selling hockey playing cards for highschool collectors over the Web. In his early twenties, he turned the star pure gasoline dealer at Enron. Arnold, who performed no position in Enron’s legendary collapse, left the corporate in 2001 with an $8 million bonus. In 2002, on the age of 28, Arnold based a hedge fund, Centaurus Advisors, which targeted on vitality investments. decade of 100% annual return.

Arnold was bored with investing and was now a multi-billionaire. He closed Centaurus in 2012 and determined to vary the world. Together with his Yale-educated lawyer spouse Laura, John established a household basis. and financed it with a big portion of their private wealth. For causes we’ll discover additional beneath, in 2019 Arnold transformed their basis right into a for-profit charity generally known as Arnold Ventures. With practically $4.7 billion in property in 2024, Arnold Ventures was a couple of third the scale of the muse world’s lions, Robert Wooden Johnson ($14.7 billion in 2023) and Ford ($13.7 billion in 2024). The 501c3 subsidiary of Arnold Ventures gave away a whopping $194 million in 2024 to a bewildering array of grantees, from the American Enterprise Institute to Households USA.

However Arnold’s enterprise mannequin is essentially totally different from these of those legacy charitable foundations.

Arnold Ventures, the guardian firm, is a for-profit company with restricted monetary disclosure necessities. It has two principal subsidiaries: the Laura and John Arnold Basis, a standard 501c3, and the Motion Now Initiative, a 501c4 nonprofit, which funds community-based coverage advocacy. Arnold’s for-profit guardian firm makes contributions to political campaigns and funds class motion lawsuits in opposition to coverage aims, with no funding disclosed as to targets or quantities. So Arnold Ventures is definitely nearer to a diversified political motion committee/public curiosity lobbyist with a targeted coverage analysis agenda than it’s to a standard basis. As Arnold himself mentioned in protection of the pliability their construction creates: “If we wish to deal with a problem, we’ll do what is important.”

Arnold Ventures has a daring coverage agenda that covers a broad vary of home points: felony justice, housing, diet, infrastructure growth (e.g., pipelines and the electrical grid), substance abuse, tax coverage, training, pension coverage, and well being care. A few of the early advocacy was on behalf of constitution colleges, but in addition for analysis integrity, by means of the Reproducibility Venture and the Middle for Open Science, searching for to find out whether or not analysis findings are literally actual, or whether or not business pursuits have filtered what reaches the general public from the lab bench.

It’s tough to pin down Arnold’s agenda on the ideological spectrum. Arnold was a serious donor to each Obama campaigns and has seemingly fallen into disrepair through the Trump period. Whereas Arnold’s agenda is broadly progressive and requires extra authorities activism, Arnold’s advocacy has additionally funded initiatives on the American Enterprise Institute, Oren Cass’s libertarian undertaking American Compass, and Brian Blase’s Paragon Well being Institute. This is all of Arnold Ventures 990’s actions, courtesy of ProPublica.

Nonetheless, the sprawling healthcare agenda seems to be consuming a big portion of undertaking funding. In 2017, Arnold employed Mark Miller, who for 15 years served as government director of MedPac, the congressional coverage advisory physique that oversees the Medicare program. Miller introduced with him what was once referred to as a primo Rolodex of contacts within the healthcare analysis neighborhood and has devoted the previous eight years to showering his colleagues with funding from Arnold Ventures. The largest beneficiaries of Arnold’s well being care coverage funding are, not surprisingly, on the nation’s elite universities.

ARNOLD VENTURES GRANT ACTIVITY FOR HEALTH POLICY AT SELECTED UNIVERSITIES 2020-2025

Supply: ProPublica Non-Revenue Explorer, 2026

The quick listing of well being coverage specialists that Arnold has funded is star-studded: Michael Chernew (Harvard College and present MedPac chairman), 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 certainly one of these main researchers mentioned to me when requested what Arnold was on the lookout for, “If you wish to wage battle on the medical-industrial advanced, Arnold is your man.”

An extended listing consists of dozens of youthful and lesser-known well being analysis scientists who signify the subsequent technology of movers and shakers in well being coverage. Arnold’s attain is broad sufficient to have a pervasive affect on the pool of peer reviewers of well being coverage articles for main journals similar to JAMA, New England Journal of Medication And Well being issues. As a refugee from academia, I can inform you that it’s a must to work exhausting to nominate leaders in healthcare analysis who usually are not funded by Arnold.

Within the spirit of vertical integration, Arnold has additionally generously funded a formidable variety of well being care foundations, nonprofits, and media shops that publish 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 Price Institute, the Nationwide Convention of State Legislatures, and the Lown Institute.

These organizations are key elements of the Arnold Coverage “ecosystem,” as they amplify and legitimize the writings of Arnold Ventures grantees and/or host conferences the place Arnold-funded specialists achieve entry to mainstream media. You just about should be hiding beneath a rock to keep away from being bombarded with Arnold Ventures-funded content material, usually with out attribution, within the well-orchestrated post-publication media protection!

Referring to his early work on scientific integrity a decade in the past, Arnold wrote on However in his personal coverage agenda, Arnold appears nicely conscious that “A brand new research of… The elite college scholar’s title will seem right here . . .” is an virtually irresistible publicity magnet. By linking the manufacturers of elite college researchers to her coverage agenda, she has adopted the basic progressive playbook.

We’ll take a more in-depth take a look at how this course of works in Half II of this report.

Jeff Goldsmith is an skilled healthcare futurist, president of Well being Futures Inc and common THCB contributor. This comes from him private substack