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Amazon Care

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11–18 of 18 posts

Re: Amazon Care

#11
It's time for a LegalZoom-like service for healthcare. 99% of visits to a physician can be addressed through textbook pills & treatment paths.

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.

Re: Amazon Care

#12
If this is the much hyped Amazon foray into the healthcare, I think it is fair to be disappointed. Digital concierge care isn't exactly new (although the onsite visits are intriguing.

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.

Re: Amazon Care

#13

I thought this was a joke at first but seems to be serious. What is the endgame for Amazon with a service like this for their employees? What do the employees miss out on using Amazon Care instead of a third-party healthcare provider and vice-versa? Their FAQ ( https://amazon.care/faq ) should include a "Why Amazon Care"

The end game is a product for the entire US. Amazon employees is just the pilot.

Re: Amazon Care

#14
post #7

On a smaller scale, Rudy’s Barbecue in Texas did something similar by canceling their comprehensive health care insurance, hiring a doctor to be the whole company's PCP, paying for surgeries directly through Texas Free Market Surgery, and buying “wraparound insurance” for everything else. https://www.bizjournals.com/austin/news/2019/06/06/rudys-bbq... (Paywalled)

There was a startup in Seattle many years ago that offered a similar program (I think it was called Qliance? They went under.) For $40 a month, you got membership to unlimited concierge care.

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.

Re: Amazon Care

#16

"You need to get more cardio. Click here to volunteer for a shift in one of our warehouses!"

Introducing Amazon Playhouse, a free gamified gym. Pack boxes, earn points, get fit! Improve your point score week-over-week and get free Amazon prime.

Once you're physically exhausted, come test your mental stamina and earn a pretty penny on Amazon Mechanical Turk, the free-to-play game which challenges your very human intelligence.

Tired of paying the bills? Coming soon, you can spend your Amazon Playhouse points to stay at Amazon Bunk, our onsite dormitory and cafeteria. You'll never have to stop playing again!

Re: Amazon Care

#17
It's nice to see feudalism is coming back. To all the services that these companies already provide, for which employees won't pay taxes (and neither will companies, due to clever tax schemes), now we add health care. Housing will be next, if not already. Legal services, transportation, food, healthcare, housing, nursery, all gross-income 100% deducted: zero sales tax, minimum income tax, in the most liberal state, by the most liberal people.

Large company-states are not that far off.

Re: Amazon Care

#18

It's nice to see feudalism is coming back. To all the services that these companies already provide, for which employees won't pay taxes (and neither will companies, due to clever tax schemes), now we add health care. Housing will be next, if not already. Legal services, transportation, food, healthcare, housing, nursery, all gross-income 100% deducted: zero sales tax, minimum income tax, in the most liberal state, b…

   You load sixteen tons, what do you get?
   Another day older and deeper in debt
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUpTJg2EBpw
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