Amazon Care

I have tele-doctor services available cheaply ($50 a pop) through my plan, and actually it works very well for a lot of nuisance type items like minor infections. It's pretty quick, and I seem to always get a doctor in my state.

I'm curious about the economies of in-home visits. Given a large enough office, in-office visits obviously makes a ton of sense and many large offices already keep a clinician or nurse desk in them (think the kind of services available at your local CVS/Walgreens). However, home visits would seem like you'd be paying a medical professional a lot of money to sit in traffic depending on the locale..

The reason is to save money by bringing a service in house, just like big companies do with all kinds of other services and products. (For example, if you're a 25-person company, you let a law firm handle your legal work. If you're a 25,000-person company, you have a staff of lawyers who work directly for you.) Insurance companies make a profit, so by doing it yourself, you can keep that money instead of giving it to them.

I don't see a reason to believe it should necessarily mean their employees miss out on anything. In theory they're at an advantage by cutting out the middleman. So in theory they could cut costs and increase benefits even if they can't improve and operate it more efficiently than current insurance companies.