Amazon Clinic

Healthcare in America feels pretty broken. Just two anecdotal examples:

- Prescription drugs are cheaper without insurance at Amazon Pharmacy or Cost Plus Drugs than they are with insurance elsewhere

- My insurance provider is Kaiser Permanente, and the plan I'm on only allows me to see Kaiser-employed doctors. I recently made an appointment for a thing I want to ensure isn't cancerous, and the soonest I could schedule is a full quarter (3 months) away. That feels like a long time; I've known people who went from diagnosis to death from cancer in six months.

Also, is it just me, but doesn't it seem like there's a huge conflict of interest in the insurer employing the only doctors you're allowed to see?

At first blush it seems like innovation in this space would be a good thing, but I'm concerned that whichever tech company manages to disrupt healthcare and/or insurance will do the thing they do, which is charge in with innovation, establish dominance, and then cut services to a bare minimum. The Google Reader of healthcare.

As always, I'm not sure what to do personally other than sign up for it and take advantage of the lower costs and easier access while I can, and hope for the best.

You’ve been diagnosed with $ILLNESS - for treatment, Amazon recommends “WOOGOOLOO Medicinal Syrup All Cure No Melamine safe for Pets and all age Children”

This looks like flailing. They just shuttered Amazon Care. Now they launch a new business offering a subset of its services via the same delivery mechanisms (minus video calls)? And it still doesn't work with insurance? Strange.

They are just competing with every other online clinic, that said I don’t trust Amazon with this kind of data

Amazon bought one medical earlier this year for 3.9 billion. I wonder if this is the result of that purchase.

Is this the OneMedical acquisition tip of the iceberg?