<story><title>Amazon launches Amazon Care, a virtual medical clinic for employees</title><url>https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/24/amazon-launches-employee-health-clinic-amazon-care.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dangus</author><text>So far, the comments here are seriously misunderstanding what Amazon is doing here, and are getting unnecessarily inflammatory just because it’s Big Bad Amazon.&lt;p&gt;It’s just a remote care benefit. My current employer offers it, administered by a vendor, and it’s separate from your actual insurance. You can call or video chat, send pictures, and even get prescriptions filled off-hours. It comes in handy for a lot of common quick scenarios.&lt;p&gt;The only news is that Amazon is big enough to self administer it.&lt;p&gt;It’s pretty much inevitable that companies of that immense size save money by self-administering or self-insuring many benefits like this.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kerkeslager</author><text>The problem is that there&amp;#x27;s numerous conflicts of interests and a strong possibility for abuse.&lt;p&gt;A lot of people on HN seem to have an &amp;quot;assume everything is okay until there is insurmountable evidence that it has been catastrophically wrong for a long time&amp;quot; approach to regulating corporations. Historically this approach has allowed corporations to abuse workers, customers, the environment, and whoever&amp;#x2F;whatever else is profitable to abuse.&lt;p&gt;Amazon isn&amp;#x27;t some ethical outlier of a corporation: they have plenty of ongoing history of worker abuses and leveraging their power in one sector to gain unfair advantage in another. So why would this be any different?&lt;p&gt;So no, I don&amp;#x27;t think people are misunderstanding this, I think they&amp;#x27;re approaching what Amazon is doing with an appropriate level of skepticism. It&amp;#x27;s incredibly naive to assume that Amazon is only going to use this in the positive ways outlined in their press releases.</text></comment>
<story><title>Amazon launches Amazon Care, a virtual medical clinic for employees</title><url>https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/24/amazon-launches-employee-health-clinic-amazon-care.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dangus</author><text>So far, the comments here are seriously misunderstanding what Amazon is doing here, and are getting unnecessarily inflammatory just because it’s Big Bad Amazon.&lt;p&gt;It’s just a remote care benefit. My current employer offers it, administered by a vendor, and it’s separate from your actual insurance. You can call or video chat, send pictures, and even get prescriptions filled off-hours. It comes in handy for a lot of common quick scenarios.&lt;p&gt;The only news is that Amazon is big enough to self administer it.&lt;p&gt;It’s pretty much inevitable that companies of that immense size save money by self-administering or self-insuring many benefits like this.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>arcticbull</author><text>Much as I think this is a job for the state and not private sector, America has a long history of employers providing healthcare. Kaiser started out as a shipbuilding company with in-house medical clinic, and eventually the shipbuilding arm folded and the medical arm opened up to all comers, yielding today’s KP.&lt;p&gt;What’s old is new again, as they say.</text></comment>