Company leader
David Goldhill
Co-Founder and CEO
Sesame
David Goldhill is co-founder and chief executive of Sesame, a marketplace where a patient can see a price and pay a clinic directly. He spent his career running television businesses until his father died of hospital infections in 2007, and the essay he wrote about that death turned him into one of health care's sharpest critics and then a founder.
Running Television Businesses
He earned a bachelor's degree in history from Harvard and a master's degree in history from New York University. He was chief financial officer of Act III Communications, a production company, and president and chief executive of television at Universal Studios until GE bought the studio in 2004. He founded TV3, a national broadcast network in Russia, which Interros Group bought in 2007, and from 2007 to 2017 he was chief executive of GSN, the company that operates the Game Show Network.
Losing His Father
In 2007 his father, in good overall health, checked into a New York City hospital with a minor case of pneumonia. Within days he developed sepsis and then a wave of secondary infections, and he died a few weeks later, the day after his 83rd birthday.
Writing How American Health Care Killed My Father
In September 2009 The Atlantic published his essay How American Health Care Killed My Father. Its argument is that insurers, employers, and government programs are the real customers in American health care, so clinics answer to them and not to the patient. He expanded it into Catastrophic Care (Knopf, 2013) and wrote The Real Costs of American Health Care (Vintage, 2016).
Founding Sesame
He co-founded Sesame as an online marketplace for discounted visits, aimed at uninsured patients and others who pay directly, and has been its chief executive since 2019. His years in television shaped the design. "I do think it's very valuable to come to healthcare from the perspective of having done something else," he said.
He also works on hospital safety and policy. He chairs the Leapfrog Group, which grades hospital safety, and he is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.