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As consolidation in U.S. healthcare continues at an increasing rate, the nation’s largest health systems and payers have evolved to look more like each other: diverse, health services giants that can deliver healthcare and coverage across a variety of settings.
But for Robert Pearl, MD, the rise of healthcare giants such as UnitedHealth Group and CVS Health are more iterations of a payer-provider model that has been working successfully for 78 years: Kaiser Permanente.
Dr. Pearl led more than 10,000 physicians at The Permanente Medical Group from 1999 to 2017 and was president of the Mid-Atlantic group from 2009 to 2017. Today, he is a clinical professor of plastic surgery at Stanford University School of Medicine and is on the faculty at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.
Becker’s sat down with Dr. Pearl to discuss the rapid consolidation in healthcare among payers and providers, along with his thoughts on what comes next for retail giants such as Amazon and Walmart.