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Amazon launches a low-cost version of Prime for Medicaid recipients
Amazon announced this morning it will offer a low-cost version of its Prime membership program to qualifying recipients of Medicaid. The program will bring the cost of Prime down from the usual $10.99 per month to about half that, at $5.99 per month, while still offering the full range of Prime perks, including free, two-day shipping on millions of products, Prime Video, Prime Music, Prime Photos, Prime Reading, Prime Now, Audible Channels, and more.
The new program is an expansion on Amazon's discounted Prime service for customers on government assistance, launched in June 2017. For the same price of $5.99 per month, Amazon offers Prime memberships to any U.S. customer with a valid EBT card – the card that's used to disburse funds for assistance programs like Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), and Women, Infants, and Children Nutrition Program (WIC).
It could be a way to get users with certain health care requirements on board before Amazon launches its own health insurance company.
Also at USA Today.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 08 2018, @07:50PM
Your "Public Health" category doesn't imply that governmental funding is necessary.
Rather, that too is a matter of risk management; a robust industry of insurance that actually manages risk would be naturally induced by market incentives to set rates in such a way that individuals and organizations take steps to reduce the risk of wide-scale epidemics. For instance, insurance companies could offer premium reductions to airports that screen passengers for sickness. Families could be given reduced premiums for getting their children vaccinated, or for getting a flu shot, etc.
Now, maybe in the present organization of society, this kind of large-scale risk management is not logistically feasible, but it's not impossible; strictly speaking, "government" is not a necessary solution. Indeed, anybody who is interested in living in a society that could be called "civilized" should be interested in replacing the "government" with something more voluntary, anyway, and that basically means replacing "government" with capitalism.