Investigate the Amazon – One Medical merger!
Petition to FTC:
We urge you to thoroughly investigate Amazon’s planned merger with telehealth provider OneMedical! This proposed $3.9 billion deal is just Amazon’s latest attempt to consolidate its monopoly power. The tech giant has demonstrated over and over again that it can’t be trusted — Amazon abuses its market power to prey on small businesses and consumers!
Amazon wants to establish a healthcare industry monopoly. That much is clear after the tech giant acquired health provider One Medical last month for a whopping $3.9 billion.1
The research is unequivocal: health industry consolidation leads to higher prices for consumers — without ensuring better care.
The Amazon – One Medical merger is bad news for health access in the United States and bad news for the economy. The merger may also be illegal under current anti-monopoly laws. Senator Amy Klobuchar, chair of the Senate committee responsible for anti-monopoly policy, is calling for a thorough investigation of the merger by the Federal Trade Commission — and we need to make sure that happens.2
Sign the petition: The Federal Trade Commission must thoroughly investigate the Amazon – One Medical merger for potential anticompetitive effects and privacy violations!
Amazon’s record raises serious concerns about the tech giant providing healthcare. Amazon has a long history of crushing its competitors and capitalizing on and abusing our data.
What’s more, this move is likely to accelerate the devastating Medicare privatization process currently underway.3 Under Medicare privatization, Medicare recipients get involuntarily assigned to private health plans. Those for-profit companies make more money if their Medicare clients receive less healthcare — in other words, they have an incentive to block older and disabled Americans from accessing healthcare.
Many Americans already pay too much for bad healthcare4 — and our economy is already dominated by Amazon and other Big Tech giants.
Not only would Amazon have too much market power with One Medical under its belt, it also would have a frightening degree of informational power. Should we trust Amazon with our private health data which could easily be abused to discriminate against consumers on the basis of health conditions? Absolutely not.
Sign the petition: Tell the FTC to thoroughly investigate the Amazon – One Medical merger for potential anticompetitive effects and privacy violations!
Sources:
- New York Times, Amazon to acquire One Medical clinics in latest push into health care.
- Senator Amy Klobuchar, Letter, July 21, 2022.
- Lever News, Amazon Joins The Medicare Privatization Spree, July 22, 2022.
- Commonwealth Fund, “U.S. Health Care from a Global Perspective, 2019: Higher Spending, Worse Outcomes?,” January 30, 2020.