One Medical is a membership-based primary care service that promises customers “7×7 access to virtual care.” The company operates in dozens of major US markets, according to its website, and works with more than 8,000 companies to deliver One Medical’s health benefits to its employees.
In a statement Thursday announcing the acquisition, Neil Lindsey, vice president of Amazon Health Services, said the e-commerce giant believes “health care is high on the list of experiences that need to be reinvented.” Lindsey added that Amazon hopes to be one of the companies “that will greatly help improve the healthcare experience over the next several years.”
Amazon has expanded its empire in recent years from online retail to entertainment, groceries and more, increasing its broad reach into consumers’ lives in the process. The acquisition of One Medical will be one of the largest acquisitions in Amazon history. Amazon agreed to buy grocery chain Whole Foods in 2017 for $13.7 billion, and earlier this year closed an $8.5 billion deal to buy popular Hollywood film studio MGM.
With the One Medical deal, Amazon will gain access to physical health clinics and “the relationships between the payment system and the hospital,” Evercore ISI analyst Elizabeth Anderson said in a Thursday morning note.
The transaction is still subject to approval by One Medical’s shareholders and regulators.
Nicholas Economides, professor of economics at New York University’s Stern School of Business, said he doubted the deal could lead to more formal antitrust scrutiny. He compared the acquisition of One Medical to Amazon’s earlier purchase of Whole Foods, saying that Amazon’s current market share in both areas was fairly small at the time of the deals in question. Traditionally, antitrust regulators have screened for mergers that might eliminate a competitor from within the same market, but they have rarely objected to deals in which a company makes its way into a neighboring industry.
“The reasons for intervention are weaker in this case than in Whole Foods, because Amazon is to some extent a marketplace for selling foodstuffs, so it was somewhat of a competitor to Whole Foods prior to the merger,” Economides said. “Here, I don’t see Amazon as having a significant healthcare business.”
However, some tech industry critics were quick to raise concerns about the deal and the data the company had access to.
Sasha Haworth, executive director of the Technology Oversight Project, said: “Amazon gaining back-door access to private healthcare data is frankly a terrifying idea and calls to focus on how urgently Congress needs to pass antitrust reform to prevent tech giants from abusing their monopoly power. “. An advocacy group, told CNN Business in a statement.
While the latest Amazon deal may not raise red flags under a traditional antitrust heading, the announcement comes as officials at the Federal Trade Commission, the Department of Justice and Congress issued a tougher note on big tech platforms and vowed to get more creative — and boldness. . On the application of competition law. Some US lawmakers are urgently pushing to pass a bill that would erect new barriers between the tech giants’ different lines of business, preventing them from using their massive reach in multiple sectors as the kind of power multiplier that critics say is hurting competition.
CNN’s Brian Fong contributed to this report.
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