RxPass, here is Amazon’s latest gimmick on the sale of drugs
Amazon: after PillPack, OneMedical and Amazon Clinic, RxPass is also here, a subscription for just $5 that offers more than 50 drugs. However, success is not taken for granted…
“Your meds. At $5 a month." This is the slogan of the latest service offered by Amazon, a subscription called RxPass, with which it will be possible to receive at home a wide range of medicines for more than 80 common health problems.
HOW RXPASS FEATURES
To subscribe to the RxPass subscription, currently active only in the United States, you must be an Amazon Prime customer, which costs $139 a year in the States.
For just $5 more, users will have access to discounted generics like any other product. According to John Love , vice president of Amazon Pharmacy, the average Prime member would save about $100 a year with RxPass.
However, people enrolled in Medicare, Medicaid or any other government health program are excluded.
WHAT DRUGS AMAZON OFFERS
The RxPass program includes more than 50 commonly prescribed drugs for more than 80 chronic conditions ranging from high blood pressure and anxiety to diabetes and male pattern baldness, Vin Gupta, chief medical officer at Amazon Pharmacy, told Reuters .
But medicines for allergies, diabetes (excluding insulin) and anemia are also available.
According to Amazon calculations reported by The Verge , more than 150 million Americans are already taking one or more of the drugs available with RxPass.
THE BULKY PRESENCE OF AMAZON IN HEALTHCARE SERVICES
As Neil Saunders , chief executive officer of GlobalData said, the launch of RxPass demonstrates that Amazon "is far from having given up on its ambitions in the healthcare sector, as it strives to serve a growing number of consumers in the prescription drug market" .
Indeed, in recent years, the giant founded by Jeff Bezos has acquired and launched various health services . In 2018, for example, it acquired online pharmacy PillPack and in 2022 primary care platform OneMedical for $3.9 billion.
Last year, while closing its Amazon Care remote assistance program (launched in 2019) it replaced it with Amazon Clinic.
WILL AMAZON ALSO HAVE TO COUNT WITH THE COMPETITION?
Although the e-commerce giant does not seem to fear competition and is fiercer than ever in conquering the health services sector, there are those who doubt its success.
Karen Van Nuys, an economist who studies drug prices at the University of Southern California, told the New York Post she's not sure of the impact RxPass will have, considering even cheaper alternatives already exist in the US.
Such is the case with the Mark Cuban CostPlus Drug Co., founded a year ago and which offers more than 800 generic drugs, many of them for less than $5 and still at significantly lower prices than most retail pharmacies. Imatinib, for example, a leukemia drug whose retail price exceeds $2,500, is just $14.40 from Cost Plus Drugs, writes CNBC . And that goes for everyone, whether or not they have health insurance.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/sanita/rxpass-amazon-farmaci/ on Wed, 25 Jan 2023 09:18:37 +0000.