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In New York City, the firm lists no offices in Manhattan uptown of West 81st Street. In the Los Angeles area, for example, One Medical lists six offices in the affluent Westside - in Beverly Hills, Century City, Culver City, Santa Monica, West Hollywood and Brentwood/West L.A. One Medical says it places its offices in “locations convenient to where consumers work, shop and live,” but that depends on how you define your consumers. Then there’s the firm’s practice of geographical segregation. That’s a discretionary charge that instantly discourages families that may have difficulty scraping together their insurance plan premiums and copays, which members must pay for separately.
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It does so partially by charging an annual fee of $199.
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One Medical aims its services, which amount to providing faster appointments, “wellness” services and “routine and preventive care,” at a relatively affluent market segment. The purchase price works out to about $18 per share, or roughly a 77% premium over the company’s stock price just prior to the announcement. Amazon’s access to information about One Medical members could heighten the danger of its spillover, to the members’ disadvantage.Īmazon plainly believes that there is profit to be made from the business model of One Medical (that’s the company’s brand name - its formal corporate moniker is 1Life Healthcare). The recent case in which Nebraska authorities relied on Facebook chat messages between a mother and daughter to charge them in connection with an allegedly illegal abortion illustrates how much ostensibly private health-related information is in the hands of social media companies, with no privacy guarantees.Īs an inveterate collector of customer data, Amazon routinely ends up with mounds of information related to users’ health, but not subject to HIPAA protection. “It would be a mistake to underestimate the corporation’s ability to navigate around the law creatively” via “legal maneuvering, discount offers, online trickery or otherwise.” “Such waivers may be intentional - but consumers may have little awareness of what they are sacrificing for modest price discounts,” Public Citizen adds. “Amazon will be well positioned to secure privacy waivers from One Medical patients,” perhaps by offering discounts on its Prime service or other blandishments. “There is very good reason to worry that HIPAA protections will be inadequate to prevent Amazon from vacuuming up One Medical patients’ data,” Public Citizen observed. They never had a chance.īut pledging to comply with the law is not much of a concession, as the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen observed in a letter urging the Federal Trade Commission and other agencies to closely scrutinize the proposed deal, which is subject to regulatory approval. Warren Buffett, Jeff Bezos, and Jamie Dimon thought they could solve healthcare. “Should the deal close, One Medical customers’ HIPAA Protected Health Information will be handled separately from all other Amazon businesses, as required by law.”īusiness Column: That Buffett-Bezos-Dimon healthcare venture goes bust - predictably “As required by law, Amazon will never share One Medical customers’ personal health information outside of One Medical for advertising or marketing purposes of other Amazon products and services without clear permission from the customer,” the company says. What data does Amazon want to collect and how can they be thinking about monetizing it? That’s not exactly what you want your healthcare provider to be thinking about.”Īmazon has issued assurances that it will adhere to the privacy mandates set forth in the federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA, which prohibits healthcare providers from sharing personal medical information without a patient’s permission. “Everyone should be asking how Amazon is looking at this from that mind-set.
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“Amazon is a data company,” says Caitlin Seeley George, managing director of Fight for the Future, a tech policy advocacy group.