Amazon Care
amazon.care
amazon.care
I have tele-doctor services available cheaply ($50 a pop) through my plan, and actually it works very well for a lot of nuisance type items like minor infections. It's pretty quick, and I seem to always get a doctor in my state.
I'm curious about the economies of in-home visits. Given a large enough office, in-office visits obviously makes a ton of sense and many large offices already keep a clinician or nurse desk in them (think the kind of services available at your local CVS/Walgreens). However, home visits would seem like you'd be paying a medical professional a lot of money to sit in traffic depending on the locale..
My best friend is a nurse practitioner. Anytime I get real sick, I text her a list of my symptoms and before the conversation is over the local pharmacy is processing my prescriptions for me.
If this doesn't highlight how fundamentally messed up the healthcare and industry is, I don't know what will. Those on the other side say "well, what if you had cancer..." Well, fine, let's keep the escalation options available (doctors/specialists/hospitals) and gut everything else.
Their FAQ (https://amazon.care/faq) should include a "Why Amazon Care"
https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2019-09-26/amazon-hea...
They're also hoping to deliver a higher quality service at lower cost... think there might be demand for such a thing?
The reason is to save money by bringing a service in house, just like big companies do with all kinds of other services and products. (For example, if you're a 25-person company, you let a law firm handle your legal work. If you're a 25,000-person company, you have a staff of lawyers who work directly for you.) Insurance companies make a profit, so by doing it yourself, you can keep that money instead of giving it to them.
I don't see a reason to believe it should necessarily mean their employees miss out on anything. In theory they're at an advantage by cutting out the middleman. So in theory they could cut costs and increase benefits even if they can't improve and operate it more efficiently than current insurance companies.
Large company-states are not that far off.
You load sixteen tons, what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt
If you are like me, you are sitting around and rooting for someone just like Amazon to come in and shake up the medical industry like they did retail and publishing. But I think too many bad practices are codified into law (understandably), and it's not a problem that enough capital is going to solve.
To be fair to digital concierge care though, I think they are good but underutilized services. A lot of time consuming things can just as easily be done virtually (getting a sick note, renewing a prescription, checking out a rash). In my experience, traditional providers do a bad job of making the services easy to use or attractive.
https://www.bizjournals.com/austin/news/2019/06/06/rudys-bbq... (Paywalled)
I think part of the story is that the "wraparound insurance" has to cover so much, that the PCP just becomes duplicitous and hard to justify.
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