Now, Amazon Wants to Be Your Doctor

A proposed merger with One Medical would further Amazon’s efforts to sit in the middle of health care transactions.

by David Dayen

July 25, 2022

Last Thursday, Amazon announced that it would purchase One Medical, a private equity-backed network of primary-care clinics, for $3.9 billion. It’s part of the company’s concerted effort to capture the health care market. Given that health care represents about one-sixth of the U.S. economy, it would be impossible for Amazon to realize its goal of sitting in between every economic transaction without getting involved in medicine. “We think healthcare is high on the list of experiences that need reinvention,” is the more euphemistic way that one of their senior vice presidents put it.

Once you start thinking about the layers of integration Amazon could exploit by adding health clinics, you realize that this merger, the first major one in the post-Bezos era, should not be allowed. Amazon already owns a pharmacy, a diagnostics company, a platform for selling retail medical products, a telehealth provider for businesses, and a back-end IT service that health companies use. This clinic network grows its presence in another area. Consolidation in health care has been at the root of the America’s distinctly poor outcomes and high prices. At some point, merger authorities have to say enough is enough.

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continua qui: https://prospect.org/health/now-amazon-wants-to-be-your-doctor/