Amazon Makes Foray Into Health Care

Amazon announced Thursday that it will acquire subscription health care company One Medical for $3.9 billion.

One Medical, which runs a membership-based primary care practice accessible through a $199 annual subscription, would follow the $13.7 billion purchase of Whole Foods in 2017 and the $8.45 billion purchase of MGM earlier this year to mark Amazon’s third largest acquisition.

“We love inventing to make what should be easy easier and we want to be one of the companies that helps dramatically improve the health care experience over the next several years,” Amazon Health Services Senior Vice President Neil Lindsay said in a press release. “Together with One Medical’s human-centered and technology-powered approach to health care, we believe we can and will help more people get better care, when and how they need it.”

Amazon is slated to buy One Medical at $18 per share in an all-cash transaction, pending approval from shareholders and regulators. “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,” One Medical CEO Amir Dan Rubin added.

In 2019, Amazon acquired startup Health Navigator after unveiling Amazon Care, a virtual health care service designed as a medical benefit for employees. One year earlier, Amazon bought PillPack, an online pharmacy company, which paid the U.S. Department of Justice nearly $6 million in penalties this year for fraudulently overbilling on insulin prescriptions.

Amazon maintained a 56.7% market share in the e-commerce sector as of 2021, according to data from PYMTS. The merger with One Medical comes as lawmakers scrutinize Amazon and other firms for alleged antitrust violations.

Earlier this year, the Senate Judiciary Committee considered bipartisan proposals such as the Open App Markets Act and the American Innovation and Choice Online Act — both of which are meant to curb technology companies’ ability to prefer their own services on platforms that they created.

In the wake of Amazon’s announcement, Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) urged Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan to “thoroughly investigate” the deal.

“Amazon has a history of engaging in business practices that raise serious anticompetitive concerns,” the letter said, “including forcing small businesses on its site to buy its logistics services as a condition of preferred platform placement, using small businesses’ non-public data to compete against them, and, as was recently disclosed in new documents from the House Judiciary Committee’s Big Tech investigation, potential restricting advertising by competitors who could offer lower prices and better service.”

Lawmakers have also scrutinized Amazon smart doorbell company Ring for providing user data to police. In response to a letter from Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) inquiring about the products’ privacy features, Ring — which Amazon acquired in 2018 for $1 billion — revealed that it had given law enforcement videos from user devices in emergency situations 11 times since the beginning of the year after making a “good-faith determination that there was an imminent danger of death or serious physical injury” to someone needing information on short notice.

Markey argued that the revelation justifies the passage of his Facial Recognition and Biometric Technology Moratorium Act — legislation that would bar state and federal entities from accessing Americans’ biometric data.

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