Amazon launches Amazon Pharmacy for prescription medicine delivery

Post by Nasrudith » Tue, Nov 17, 2020, 9:13 PM UTC

Simulacra wrote: post #15

sytelus wrote: post #13

Just wondering why couldn’t Walgreens do this? During covid, Walgreens is still one store that you must visit physically to get your prescription. I always thought there was some crazy health care regularization that prevented medicine delivery.

Not neccessarily. There has been a push in the past ten years for mail order handled by Pharmacy Benefit Managers. PBM's are entities that work directly with the drug manufacturer to purchase in bulk, then delivering straight to the consumer at a lower cost than the pharmacy. The retail pharmacy industry, both chain and independent, absolutely despise PBM's and fight vociferously against them because it gives consume…

Post by dageshi » Tue, Nov 17, 2020, 9:17 PM UTC

ev1 wrote: post #111

dudus wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not surprised, there's some serious shenanigans on medicine pricing and insurances. Medicine prices are clearly inflated when you can buy at a huge discount using insurance, but then you can get apps like GoodRX, which is free and give you coupons that far exceed my insurance discount on every single time I had to fill a prescription. To the point that I don't even bother going through insurance anymore. I saved…

I'm curious who or what the end goal of GoodRx is. They pay for expensive ($$$$$$) cloud anti-bot/anti-scraping, captcha you after a few requests if you run adblock, they pay for extensive browser/device (attempting to reidentify a user across multiple devices/multiple browsers) fingerprinting services and Fastly. The site loads a dozen trackers, googletagmanager, branch, segment, what are they doing with this data?…

Post by throwawayfppcmt » Tue, Nov 17, 2020, 9:20 PM UTC

mysticllama wrote: post #90

llee37x wrote: post #2

Just a heads up, if you use this service PillPack and Amazon Employees have full access to your entire prescription history. Full name, social everything - it was common for employees to look up the info of celebrities / other employees for fun. Any prescription / healthcare info you give them will be sold back to SureScripts and used to sell you more garbage from Amazon ;) https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-mail-or…

What is your source for the claim that Amazon - PillPack employees commonly accessed prescription info "for fun?" I worked at PillPack for over 3 years, and while I haven't been there for a while this seems like a very bold claim that is wildly inconsistent with the sort of practices I saw followed in my time there. I don't think using a throwaway to throw shade like this is the right way to handle such a serious mat…

Post by s1artibartfast » Tue, Nov 17, 2020, 9:21 PM UTC

kodah wrote: post #110

lotsofpulp wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The above situation does not fit the definition of monopoly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly > A monopoly (from Greek μόνος, mónos, 'single, alone' and πωλεῖν, pōleîn, 'to sell') exists when a specific person or enterprise is the only supplier of a particular commodity. This contrasts with a monopsony which relates to a single entity's control of a market to purchase a good or service, and with oligopoly and d…

I know what the legal and colloquial definitions of a monopoly are. It obviously needs to change. I cannot fathom how one company with all these varied interests and capabilities are somehow "good for consumers", which is exactly the spirit of anti-trust law. At one point in American history we were far too loose and reckless with what a monopoly was defined as. Now, nothing is a monopoly. I can't imagine how this is…

Post by ev1 » Tue, Nov 17, 2020, 9:24 PM UTC

dageshi wrote: post #154

ev1 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious who or what the end goal of GoodRx is. They pay for expensive ($$$$$$) cloud anti-bot/anti-scraping, captcha you after a few requests if you run adblock, they pay for extensive browser/device (attempting to reidentify a user across multiple devices/multiple browsers) fingerprinting services and Fastly. The site loads a dozen trackers, googletagmanager, branch, segment, what are they doing with this data?…

Usually coupon sites are very profitable because they signal immediate intent to purchase, I assume they have affiliate links for whoever they're providing coupons for, any kind of coupon site is usually in fierce competition. As for all the bot countermeasures, the reason for that isn't immediately obvious to me, I assume it must be due to that competition.