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Amazon launches Amazon Pharmacy for prescription medicine delivery

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Re: Amazon launches Amazon Pharmacy for prescription medicine delivery

#231

Post by ericmay »

ev1 wrote: post #222
ineedasername wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their end-game is collecting user data & collecting a referral fee when people use their "insurance". (The coupons generally are not actual coupons, they present as an insurance coverage policy & code that pharmacies use the same way they would your normal insurance card). That's how they make their money. Personally, for me, the data they can collect off of me when I go to their site is worth the ~$2,000 I save ever…

As a European now living in the US, my first thought is that the $2,000 shouldn't even exist to be collected, especially by invasive data broker rent seekers.

It’s collected (generally speaking) one way or another. Unfortunately right now it’s collected from the lower and middle classes, but no matter what you do drugs, treatments, doctors, hospitals, etc. cost money. It’s never, ever, ever “free”. If a drug costs $2,000/month there are probably some inefficiencies baked into the price, but even if it were $500/month, that $500 has to come from somewhere.

Re: Amazon launches Amazon Pharmacy for prescription medicine delivery

#232

Post by ericd »

ericmay wrote: post #231
ev1 wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a European now living in the US, my first thought is that the $2,000 shouldn't even exist to be collected, especially by invasive data broker rent seekers.

It’s collected (generally speaking) one way or another. Unfortunately right now it’s collected from the lower and middle classes, but no matter what you do drugs, treatments, doctors, hospitals, etc. cost money. It’s never, ever, ever “free”. If a drug costs $2,000/month there are probably some inefficiencies baked into the price, but even if it were $500/month, that $500 has to come from somewhere.

Probably some inefficiencies baked into the price? There are massive inefficiencies at every level. I probably wouldn't share this "it's the way it is because it has to be" reasoning if you've never looked into why US healthcare is as expensive as it is.

For a decent overview: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/why-does-health-care-co...

"Just to give you one example, Duke University Hospital has 900 hospital beds and 1,300 billing clerks."

Re: Amazon launches Amazon Pharmacy for prescription medicine delivery

#234

Post by notsureaboutpg »

satya71 wrote: post #209
bhupy wrote: post #7

> Amazon claims Prime members will be able to save “up to 80 percent off generic and 40 percent off brand name medications when paying without insurance. This was buried in the article, but is IMO a bigger deal. In the long run, this could really drive down drug prices.

So savings are similar to GoodRx, RxSaver, and WellRx?

Yep, this is just GoodRx. GoodRx adverts are in most pharmacies. I've had a pharmacist apply a GoodRx discount code for me without my asking before. Pharmacies already run on such discounts.

Re: Amazon launches Amazon Pharmacy for prescription medicine delivery

#235

Post by DominikPeters »

bhupy wrote: post #7

> Amazon claims Prime members will be able to save “up to 80 percent off generic and 40 percent off brand name medications when paying without insurance. This was buried in the article, but is IMO a bigger deal. In the long run, this could really drive down drug prices.

This is just a shallow wrapper around https://insiderx.com/ which appears to be a GoodRx clone. See https://www.amazon.com/primerx.

Re: Amazon launches Amazon Pharmacy for prescription medicine delivery

#236

Post by 93po »

ericmay wrote: post #231
ev1 wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a European now living in the US, my first thought is that the $2,000 shouldn't even exist to be collected, especially by invasive data broker rent seekers.

It’s collected (generally speaking) one way or another. Unfortunately right now it’s collected from the lower and middle classes, but no matter what you do drugs, treatments, doctors, hospitals, etc. cost money. It’s never, ever, ever “free”. If a drug costs $2,000/month there are probably some inefficiencies baked into the price, but even if it were $500/month, that $500 has to come from somewhere.

Insulin that costs $500 a month after expensive insurance discounts only costs about $5 to manufacture and sells for $30 a month in Canada

Re: Amazon launches Amazon Pharmacy for prescription medicine delivery

#237

Post by dmix »

dudus wrote: post #72
bhupy wrote: post #7

> Amazon claims Prime members will be able to save “up to 80 percent off generic and 40 percent off brand name medications when paying without insurance. This was buried in the article, but is IMO a bigger deal. In the long run, this could really drive down drug prices.

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…

Just like school tuition. The more gov subsidized debt that can't be bankrupted the more admins they keep hiring and the bigger the cost/shit rolls down hill.

Combine that with a culture that overvalues all university diplomas as equal, while disregarding the economic opportunities of at least half of them are almost nil, and you have a great recipe for massive failure for a big percentage of the young population.

The half baked social programs always do this. Same with how rent control in NYC and Toronto in the 1970s ended up significantly reducing the supply of low-income housing because it stopped incentivizing developers from building cheap houses in cities that had it (they just went elsewhere) while also ghettoizing a bunch of neighbourhoods because there was zero incentive to maintain buildings (which led to mass arsons in places like harlem).

If you're going to socialize it either go all the way and nationalize it/fully fund it or find a way that doesn't fuck the citizens over (like these glorified schemes to hand money over to politicially-connected middlemen like big pharma and diploma mills). OR in most cases just let the market do it's job. Like letting generic drug makers take over markets way sooner, without the multitude of government protection rackets that protect big pharma (including FDAs giant backlog). Meanwhile (social) media blames capitalism for every expensive drug or tuition price... like it actually makes sense for ANY market to charge a working class person $1000/pill.

These flaws seem so obvious to me but are repeated in so many western countries, not just the US. While blame goes in so many randomly misguided directions. Often heavily greased by the people who benefit from these schemes.

Re: Amazon launches Amazon Pharmacy for prescription medicine delivery

#238

Post by smabie »

peter303 wrote: post #198
lotsofpulp wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would add a 4th service for health insurance in the US to be a way for healthy, young people to pay for the care of sicker, old people due. AKA, a tax, due to the following stipulations of the ACA. 1) Age Rating Factors https://www.cms.gov/CCIIO/Programs-and-Initiatives/Health-In... 2) Out of pocket maximums for in network care 3) Elimination of pre-existing conditions, i.e. accepting all lives no matter how costly…

You will get old

I mean, not necessarily

Re: Amazon launches Amazon Pharmacy for prescription medicine delivery

#239

Post by smabie »

Frost1x wrote: post #61
lbacaj wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You really believe the government will do a better job?

Better than the farce that is "competitive market forces." I have more faith in government than corporate structures delivering optimal cost pricing to consumers as opposed to optimizing their profit margins. Competive forces only work while there's competition, the second competition declines, rest assured consumer pricing is the first to take a hit.

Amazon doesn't have that robust of competition, and the pricing is really good across the board. They could charge a lot more

Re: Amazon launches Amazon Pharmacy for prescription medicine delivery

#240

Post by smabie »

xtracto wrote: post #153
lbacaj wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You really believe the government will do a better job?

I think the USA Military branch of the government does a very good job managing their resources. Why would it be different in other branch?

The pentagon wastes more money than any other government agency. And I don't mean waste as in spending money on something I don't like, I mean waste as in buying one thousand nails and then throwing 999 of them into the lake because they only needed one and they have a quarterly budget they need to burn. Billions and billions of dollars go unaccounted for every year, their books are a mess, and congress just lets them essentially steal from the taxpayer, year over year.
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