Amazon is like the bogeyman, in whichever industry you work in, you just hope Amazon doesn't enter your domain and crushes you...
Amazon launches Amazon Pharmacy for prescription medicine delivery
31–40 of 276 posts
Re: Amazon launches Amazon Pharmacy for prescription medicine delivery
#32As a British citizen, this is so disturbing to me.
As an American resident, I couldn't be more excited for Amazon to disrupt the reprehensible anti-customer practices endemic to the US healthcare system.
Recently, I had a runny nose and no fever and thought, "what the heck, let's get a COVID test", and found out they are $200+ here in Austin.
Re: Amazon launches Amazon Pharmacy for prescription medicine delivery
#33> 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.
You can probably save more at Walmart
https://www.walmart.com/cp/4-prescriptions/1078664
Prescription Program includes up to a 30-day supply for $4 and a 90-day supply for $10 of some covered generic drugs at commonly prescribed dosages.
Re: Amazon launches Amazon Pharmacy for prescription medicine delivery
#34Companies that big should not be allowed to operate. They will have too much personal data and incredible unfair competitive advantage on the market. It's when capitalism doesn't work and where it needs to have emergency stops. Amazon needs to be split into independent companies. Now that Amazon will also know your medical history, know what you are talking about at home, all your preferences, who you meet, what are…
You're probably right, and I agree with you.
However, in this case, the US healthcare system is so terrible and, in some respects, evil that I'm glad Amazon is working to disrupt (what'll probably end up being) large portions of it.
Re: Amazon launches Amazon Pharmacy for prescription medicine delivery
#35As a British citizen, this is so disturbing to me.
Why? We have prescriptions here and it's a service that needs disrupting. My Dad has a monthly prescription he has to pick up from Boots because no delivery service he has ever used has been reliable. The branch he goes to is 10 miles from his home because every other branch nearer to him has let him down badly in the past with missing items he has had to chase up for days afterwards.
We're talking about picking 6 labelled items from a shelf and putting them in a paper bag. How someone can get that wrong over and over again baffles me?
Re: Amazon launches Amazon Pharmacy for prescription medicine delivery
#36I am all for competition, but i really think there should be some government oversight on prices, even if private services handle the delivery etc.
I wonder what items can't be delivered. I suspect a large uptick in the theft of Amazon deliveries with this news.
Re: Amazon launches Amazon Pharmacy for prescription medicine delivery
#37As a British citizen, this is so disturbing to me.
You can get similar services in the UK. EG https://www.echo.co.uk/
Re: Amazon launches Amazon Pharmacy for prescription medicine delivery
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don't they do a better job in lots of other countries? I'm not an expert, but my understanding is that a lot of the countries with socialized medicine such that their government is the one negotiating with drug manufacturers pay substantially less for drugs than customers in the US.
In other countries, government “negotiation” is just a euphemism for price controls. An example of this is Canada’s Patented Medicine Prices Review Board, which regulates drug prices. This isn’t “negotiation”, this is just centralized policy-driven price control. The US could very well institute their own price controls on drugs, but it wouldn’t invalidate the value in services like Amazon’s, especially if the price…
I support price controls in the US, and the government manufacturing generics if necessary (stepping in if the private sector won't due to it not being profitable enough).
EDIT: I removed an unrelated paragraph about Planned Parenthood and drug supply chain I thought was out of scope.
Re: Amazon launches Amazon Pharmacy for prescription medicine delivery
#39Just 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…
I feel like if this were true HIPPA/HHS would have asses in slings. I've worked in a couple of places that worked with HIPPA-adjacent data and boy howdy you don't not mess with them.
It's HIPAA, and there's no such meaningful category as HIPAA-adjacent data. Data is either PHI held by HIPAA covered entities or it's not, and consumer health and wellness data that one would see as being equally sensitive but that involves consumer transactions with an entity which is not a “covered entity” as defined in HIPAA (including where the consumer takes information from a covered entity and provides it to the service, so that the service is engaged by the consumer but has no business relation to the covered entity) is simply not PHI protected by HIPAA.
On the other hand, the information you describe from a pharmacy customer isn't “HIPAA adjacent”, it's just plain HIPAA PHI. on the gripping hand, lots of places have fairly weak internal controls on access to PHI; there is no required independent certification of practices, only after-the-fact enforcement when an unauthorized use occurs, is reported, and is investigated. And lots of places that haven't been caught out yet have training in what your not allowed to do with data, but inadequate controls on what you can do and inadequate auditing of what you have done.
Re: Amazon launches Amazon Pharmacy for prescription medicine delivery
#40> 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.
You can probably save more at Walmart https://www.walmart.com/cp/4-prescriptions/1078664 Prescription Program includes up to a 30-day supply for $4 and a 90-day supply for $10 of some covered generic drugs at commonly prescribed dosages.
This is very similar (and really interesting) though I’m not sure if Walmart has a special condition on use of insurance.
Amazon appears to be incentivizing customers to not use insurance to pay for their drugs. I’m not sure if Walmart does the same. If so, that’s also noteworthy.