Wah Wah CVS
CVS is pulling the plug on its grand “reinvent healthcare” fantasy. Color me *not surprised*. I’ve lived through more of these corporate moonshots than I’ve had MRIs, and that’s saying something. One minute it’s all “disruptive innovation” and “patient-centric care,” and the next—it’s “this didn’t scale.” Translation: Wall Street didn’t like the ROI.
I’m sharing this because it’s personal. During my tenure at Stupid Cancer, I watched CVS flirt with patient trust like it was a Tinder date: shallow, transactional, and doomed from the start. You can’t duct-tape primary care to a retail chain and call it progress. Patients aren’t barcodes. Clinicians aren’t interchangeable widgets.
CVS wanted to own healthcare. Instead, it proved why no one should.
They bought Signify. They bought Oak Street. They pumped out press releases, hired consultants, and drank their own PowerPoint Kool-Aid. But here's the problem: they treated the system like a business school case study, not like real people’s lives.
Every few years, a new corporate messiah claims they’ll “fix” healthcare (Dear Amazon...) usually by making it easier for themselves to bill you while doing less. It's the same consolidation scam in a shinier box.
If you're serious about fixing care, stop treating patients like profit margins and start investing in relationships, trust, and actual access.
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