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from the what's-the-affiliate-program-going-to-look-like-for-this? dept.
Amazon to buy One Medical, which runs 180+ medical offices throughout the US:
When Amazon launched Amazon Care to its employees in 2019, the goal was to test the product before rolling it out nationwide. After that rollout happened earlier this year, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy told Insider that the expansion would "fundamentally" change the health care game by dramatically enhancing the medical-care process. He predicted that patients in the future would be so used to telehealth and other new conveniences that they'll think that things like long wait times and delays between in-person visits commonly experienced today are actually "insane."
Now, The Wall Street Journal reports, Amazon has gone one step closer to that future by agreeing to a $3.9 billion deal to purchase One Medical, a company that operates a network of health clinics. With this move, Amazon will expand the number of patients it serves by gaining access to "a practice that operates more than 180 medical offices in 25 US markets and works with more than 8,000 companies to provide health benefits to employees, including with in-person and virtual care."
Echoing Jassy's enthusiasm, Neil Lindsay, Amazon Health Services' senior vice president, told WSJ that the company thinks "health care is high on the list of experiences that need reinvention." Purchasing One Medical is a way for Amazon to break further into the $4 trillion health care industry at a time when Amazon's revenue is down and costs are up.
[...] After the deal is done, One Medical chief executive Amir Dan Rubin "will remain CEO." In a news release to One Medical investors, Rubin expressed a lot of enthusiasm for the deal.
"The opportunity to transform health care and improve outcomes by combining One Medical's human-centered and technology-powered model and exceptional team with Amazon's customer obsession, history of invention, and willingness to invest in the long-term is so exciting," Rubin says. "There is an immense opportunity to make the health care experience more accessible, affordable, and even enjoyable for patients, providers, and payers."
[...] It has not been a total success story, though. Almost half a billion of Amazon's investment in One Medical is paying off the company's debt.
One Medical also recently came under fire in 2021 during a Congressional investigation into how it administered COVID-19 vaccines when they first became available in December 2020.
[...] Rubin was leading the company at the time. He has been CEO of One Medical since 2017 and has previously held executive roles for decades at health care companies, including a recent stint at UnitedHealth Group.
Congress' recent investigation into One Medical's untimely delivery of vaccines to vulnerable communities is not mentioned in the joint press release from Amazon and One Medical. Instead, Lindsay expresses full confidence in how One Medical handles delivery of patient care, saying Amazon will benefit from One Medical's "human-centered and technology-powered approach to health care," which Amazon believes "can and will help more people get better care, when and how they need it."
(Score: 1, Redundant) by RedGreen on Sunday July 31 2022, @03:41PM
"Please stop propagating this stupid meme. Socialism is not when the "government does stuff", it is perfectly in line with right-wing economics (including liberalism) to have government spending. Socialism is when the means of production are owned by society as opposed to privately owned. The government giving free money to the bourgeois neo-aristoracy is typical of advanced capitalism."
Please learn your terms. Communism is when the means of production is owned by the government, Socialism is exactly that when the governerment or the people themselves does things that are shared with society they are closely related. But a socialist system does not necessarily have the government owning the means of production like the communism does. The last part giving the cash and the political corruption that it results from is called a Kleptocracy or crony capitalism. From the Wackypaedia.
"Communism (from Latin communis, 'common, universal')[1][2] is a far-left[3][4][5] philosophical, social, political, and economic ideology and movement whose goal is the establishment of a communist society, namely a socioeconomic order based on the idea of common ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange—allocating products to everyone in the society."
"Socialism (/'soʊʃəlɪsm/) is a left-wing to far-left[1][2] economic philosophy and movement encompassing a range of economic systems characterized by the dominance of social ownership[3][4][5][6] of the means of production[6][7][8][9][10][11][12] as opposed to private ownership."
"Kleptocracy (from Greek κλέπτης kléptēs, "thief", κλέπτω kléptō, "I steal", and -κρατία -kratía from κράτος krátos, "power, rule") is a government whose corrupt leaders (kleptocrats) use political power to expropriate the wealth of the people and land they govern, typically by embezzling or misappropriating government funds at the expense of the wider population.[1][2] Thievocracy means literally the rule by thievery and is a term used synonymously to kleptocracy.[3][4] One feature of political-based socioeconomic thievery is that there is often no public announcement explaining or apologizing for misappropriations, nor any legal charges or punishment levied against the offenders."
"Crony capitalism, sometimes called cronyism, is an economic system in which businesses thrive not as a result of free enterprise, but rather as a return on money amassed through collusion between a business class and the political class. This is often achieved by the manipulation of relationships with state power by business interests rather than unfettered competition in obtaining permits, government grants, tax breaks, or other forms of state intervention[1][2] over resources where business interests exercise undue influence over the state's deployment of public goods, for example, mining concessions for primary commodities or contracts for public works."
"I modded down, down, down, and the flames went higher." -- Sven Olsen