4 ms·

Amazon Care

26 points by tvanzyl 7y ago

cvaidya1986 7y ago
Sounds like the goal is to pilot within Amazon first and then make it available for all.
capableweb 7y ago
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 https://amazon.care/faq) should include a "Why Amazon Care"
- jpm_sd 7y ago
  They're hoping to save a TON of money. This isn't their only health care experiment: https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2019-09-26/amazon-healthcare-prime-david-lazarus https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2019-09-26/amazon-hea... They're also hoping to deliver a higher quality service at lower cost... think there might be demand for such a thing? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haven_(healthcare) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haven_(healthcare)
- adrianmonk 7y ago
  I haven't been following closely, but I assume this must be the launch of Haven: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haven_(healthcare) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haven_(healthcare) 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.
- hammock 7y ago
  The end game is a product for the entire US. Amazon employees is just the pilot.
vorpalhex 7y ago
This is an interesting idea. 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..
smacktoward 7y ago
"You need to get more cardio. Click here to volunteer for a shift in one of our warehouses!"
- evv 7y ago
  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!
zachrose 7y ago
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-expects-to-slash-health-costs-with-major.html https://www.bizjournals.com/austin/news/2019/06/06/rudys-bbq... (Paywalled)
- legitster 7y ago
  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.
univalent 7y ago
Cerner does this in office in Kansas City. I thought it was pretty cool. Keeps their costs (presumably) lower.
dang 7y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21064517 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21064517
anon11378 7y ago
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.
legitster 7y ago
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.
purplezooey 7y ago
Holy crap there's a mailto: link at the bottom. The 1990s called and wants their web page back.
bassman9000 7y ago
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.
- pdelgallego 7y ago
  You load sixteen tons, what do you get? Another day older and deeper in debt https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUpTJg2EBpw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUpTJg2EBpw

26 points by tvanzyl 7y ago

cvaidya1986 7y ago

Sounds like the goal is to pilot within Amazon first and then make it available for all.

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 https://amazon.care/faq) should include a "Why Amazon Care"

jpm_sd 7y ago
They're hoping to save a TON of money. This isn't their only health care experiment: https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2019-09-26/amazon-healthcare-prime-david-lazarus https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2019-09-26/amazon-hea... They're also hoping to deliver a higher quality service at lower cost... think there might be demand for such a thing? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haven_(healthcare) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haven_(healthcare)
adrianmonk 7y ago
I haven't been following closely, but I assume this must be the launch of Haven: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haven_(healthcare) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haven_(healthcare) 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.
hammock 7y ago
The end game is a product for the entire US. Amazon employees is just the pilot.

vorpalhex 7y ago

This is an interesting idea. 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..

smacktoward 7y ago

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

evv 7y ago
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!

zachrose 7y ago

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-expects-to-slash-health-costs-with-major.html https://www.bizjournals.com/austin/news/2019/06/06/rudys-bbq... (Paywalled)

legitster 7y ago
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.

univalent 7y ago

Cerner does this in office in Kansas City. I thought it was pretty cool. Keeps their costs (presumably) lower.

dang 7y ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21064517 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21064517

anon11378 7y ago

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.

legitster 7y ago

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.

purplezooey 7y ago

Holy crap there's a mailto: link at the bottom. The 1990s called and wants their web page back.

bassman9000 7y ago

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.

pdelgallego 7y ago
You load sixteen tons, what do you get? Another day older and deeper in debt https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUpTJg2EBpw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUpTJg2EBpw