> Amazon claims Prime members will be able to save “up to 80 percent off generic and 40 percent off brand name medications when paying without insurance.<p>This was buried in the article, but is IMO a bigger deal. In the long run, this could really drive down drug prices.
Just a heads up, if you use this service PillPack and Amazon Employees have full access to your entire prescription history. Full name, social everything - it was common for employees to look up the info of celebrities / other employees for fun.<p>Any prescription / healthcare info you give them <i>will</i> be sold back to SureScripts and used to sell you more garbage from Amazon ;)<p><a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-mail-order-pharmacy-faces-pushback-11565103923" rel="nofollow">https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-mail-order-pharmacy-face...</a>
Truepill.com has api's for pharmacy fulfillment (including pharmacy transfers) <a href="https://docs.truepill.com/#introduction" rel="nofollow">https://docs.truepill.com/#introduction</a><p>[disclosure : I work there]
There is a lot to wonder about here like...<p>Should people be comfortable with Amazon tracking their drug purchases alongside all the other tracking they do of them?<p>How will Amazon use the tracking information from drug purchases?<p>Amazon has copied many patented products to sell under their own brand. Would they do that with drugs and use the same tactics?
Just wondering why couldn’t Walgreens do this? During covid, Walgreens is still one store that you must visit physically to get your prescription. I always thought there was some crazy health care regularization that prevented medicine delivery.
I'm waiting for the moment when they say Amazon launches on another planet. They seem to be doing everything. It's only time before they cover quite literally every product and service on the earth. At which point there's nothing to conquer except space.
I tried to go to their site to look up a drug that my spouse takes - you can't look up prices without signing up and you have to give them your phone number...NOPE!
I've been a PillPack customer for the past six months, since my local pharmacy closed (apparently for good) because of COVID19. It would be nice to be able to fine-grain adjust the monthly delivery date, and/or get more than a 30-day supply at a time, but I have no complaints.
I am all for competition, but i really think there should be some government oversight on prices, even if private services handle the delivery etc.<p>I wonder what items can't be delivered. I suspect a large uptick in the theft of Amazon deliveries with this news.
I wonder if AMZN stock has priced in the possibility, perhaps likely outcome, of tens of millions of Americans getting a substantial portion of their healthcare through "Prime Health" within ten years.
Kind of astounded at the responses in this thread insisting on believing Amazon wouldn't do anything nasty or obviously illegal with an individual's healthcare data. They've done nasty and obviously illegal things with all of the other data that passes through their systems, and yet here we are defending and getting excited about them further intruding into our lives.
I wonder if Amazon will have sufficient buying clout to get better medication prices that they can pass along to consumers. That's been a huge benefit of centralized universal healthcare buying in other countries.
This reminds me of RX Limited, and Paul Le Roux.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Le_Roux" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Le_Roux</a>
I personally already use PillPack, but what I am more curious is this line that so far I can only find on the verge and not any of the Amazon pages.<p>"Prime members will also be able to save on medication bought in person from over 50,000 pharmacies across the US, including Rite Aid, CVS, Walmart, and Walgreens."<p>I assume that means that Amazon actually worked with all of these companies? Does anyone see that on any of the Amazon pages?
Given the issue with counterfeit material in their warehouses, I don’t even know what they could do to make me trust their control of the drug supply chain.
Companies that big should not be allowed to operate. They will have too much personal data and incredible unfair competitive advantage on the market. It's when capitalism doesn't work and where it needs to have emergency stops. Amazon needs to be split into independent companies. Now that Amazon will also know your medical history, know what you are talking about at home, all your preferences, who you meet, what are your problems, probably they know even more that Google. This should be stopped. We shouldn't be trading freedom for a notion of convenience.
This strikes me as a tone deaf move for Amazon. They're increasingly losing consumer confidence and are starting, anecdotally at least, to be regarded as closer to a flea market or eBay than a trustworthy retailer. They really need to shore up the issues with tainted supplies in their core retail business before I would ever consider them for something as sensitive as pharmaceuticals, regardless of how much they promise its handled differently.