In this post, I link to the New York Times,* Not Even Amazon Can Deliver a Fix for America’s Broken Health Care, Sept. 2, 2022, by Libby Watson.
*Link is to the New York Times subscription site. This is NOT an affiliate link. I just think everyone can benefit from reading the New York Times.
Introduction to the article.
What if you could get health care as quickly and easily as you order socks and cat litter? It sounds fanciful in a country where people die waiting to see a doctor, but Amazon believed it could do for health care what it had done for shopping. Hailed as “the future of medicine,” the Amazon Care telehealth and house-call service was pitched to employers as “high-quality care, convenience and peace of mind.”
Last week, though, the company announced it would shut down Amazon Care at the end of this year. For the second time in two years, Amazon has had to concede failure in an effort to take on the American health care system. It might be possible to deliver a spatula to someone’s apartment in 24 hours, but applying the same approach to health care seems a taller order.
Yet Amazon is not giving up: It plans to purchase One Medical, a membership-based primary care provider with in-person and telehealth services in 19 cities. One Medical could prove a better business bet, but there’s no grand fix for the health care system to be achieved here.
