Aaron's Status
January 13, 2025
5:57 pm
I’m unreasonably mad about “Amazon One Medical” and this is going to be a rant about that.
I listen to quite a few podcasts and lately I’ve been hearing a lot of ads for “Amazon One Medical.” I opened up the website for it and what it looks like is a web/app-based broker for getting local and telehealth visits for specific maladies.
The stuff they list is like “strep throat” and “male hair loss” and “pink eye.” The sorts of things that are pretty easily diagnosed and treated. But they claim “24/7 on-demand care” and “ongoing support” if you pay the $9 per month (with Prime, of course).
It’s not that someone, anyone, filling in the gaps in our crumbling healthcare infrastructure fundamentally pisses me off. I’m a huge fan of Mark Cuban’s “Cost Plus Drugs,” for example. What pisses me off is that we’ve allowed things to get this bad, and now the vultures are going to swoop in.
It’s not bad enough that your veterinarian and your dentist are both bought and paid for by private equity scumbags, or that one third of GoFundMe campaigns are for medical bills, or that medical students don’t even want to be general practitioners anymore because we’ve made the job so horrible.
It’s not bad enough that a kid can straight up murder the CEO of a health insurance company in broad daylight in the biggest city in America and the response is, mainly, cheers. I mean, if you think about that for more than 22 seconds, it’s pretty fucked up, right?
But now, because you struggle to find a way to get an appointment with any decent care provider to take a look at your chronic cough, you’re going to give more money to Amazon, the retail juggernaut trying as hard as it can to absorb the entire American economy so that it never has to compete with anyone anymore. This is what it’s come to? This is the answer?
The answer to all of the urgent care waiting rooms overflowing is to add another boondoggle to your Prime membership? Because surely those assholes don’t have enough of your money, yet.
Every day I wake up and look around and can’t help but feel that we’re inching ever closer to the world described in Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash. It’s terrifying.