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..
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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