One Medical is a member-based primary care service that promises customers “access to 24/7 virtual care.” According to its website, the company operates in dozens of major US markets and works with more than 8,000 companies to offer One Medical health benefits to their employees.
In a statement Thursday announcing the acquisition, Neil Lindsay, Senior Vice President of Amazon Health Services, said the e-commerce giant considers “healthcare to be on the list of great experiences.” experience needs to be reproduced”. Lindsay added that Amazon hopes to be one of the companies “to dramatically improve the healthcare experience over the next few years.”
Amazon in recent years has expanded its empire from online retail to entertainment, groceries and more, increasing their broad reach into consumers’ lives in the process. this. The acquisition of One Medical will be one of the largest in Amazon’s history. Amazon agreed to buy grocery chain Whole Foods in 2017 for $13.7 billion and earlier this year closed a $8.5 billion deal to buy iconic Hollywood studio MGM.
With the One Medical deal, Amazon will have access to physical health clinics and “the relationship between the payer and the hospital system,” Evercore ISI analyst Elizabeth Anderson said in a note. Thursday morning.
This agreement is still subject to approval by One Medical shareholders and regulators.
Nicholas Economides, a professor of economics at New York University’s Stern School of Business, said he was skeptical the deal could trigger more formal antitrust checks. He compared the One Medical acquisition to Amazon’s previous Whole Foods acquisition, saying that Amazon’s existing market share in both industries was quite small at the time of the respective deals. Traditionally, antitrust regulators have scrutinized mergers that could remove a competitor from the same market, but rarely objected to transactions in which one company encroached on one another. pitch to an adjacent industry.
“The basis for intervention in this case is even weaker than at Whole Foods, because to some extent Amazon is a marketplace for food, so to a small extent it is a competitor. of Whole Foods before the merger,” Economides said. “Here, I don’t see Amazon having significant business in healthcare.”
However, some critics in the tech industry were quick to raise concerns about the deal and the data the company could access.
Sacha Haworth, executive director of the advocacy group Technology Monitoring Project, told CNN Business in a statement.
While Amazon’s latest deal may not give a red flag under traditional antitrust review boards, the announcement comes as officials at the Federal Trade Commission, the Justice Department and Congress has taken a tougher line on major tech platforms and pledged to be more innovative – and more active – in terms of competition law enforcement. Some US lawmakers are urgently pushing through a bill that could erect new barriers between tech giants’ disparate businesses, preventing them from using their massive scale. across multiple verticals as a type of workforce that critics say harms competition.
CNN’s Brian Fung contributed to this report.
