Amazon’s
AMZN,
-1.77%
$3.9 billion acquisition of One Medical
ONEM,
-0.58%
is the e-commerce giant’s biggest bet on healthcare to date, and it hints at a future in which primary care and streaming options will be bundled together. One Medical is a direct primary-care company. Patients (or their employers) pay extra — it’s $199 a year for individuals—to have access to a network of clinics and providers as well as the option to use a mobile app and virtual care. The company, which went public in January 2020 under the name 1Life Healthcare Inc., also provides a membership option to people with Medicare Advantage plans through Iora Health, which it bought for $2.1 billion a year ago.
One Medical has 188 offices and about 730,000 members. It’s not a surprise that One Medical was up for sale. Earlier this month Bloomberg reported that CVS Health
CVS,
+0.93%,
which operates the health insurer Aetna, had reportedly considered buying the company at one point. It’s also not surprising that Amazon is the buyer. The tech behemoth has steadily built out a wide-reaching healthcare business over the past four or so years. It bought PillPack, a medication-delivery service that presented a clean, millennial-friendly user interface, for about $1 billion in cash in 2018. It has been working with Crossover Health since mid-2020 setting up employee health centers that offer primary care. And it now offers Amazon Care to employees and other employers. “Healthcare is high on the list of experiences that need reinvention,” Neil Lindsay, senior vice president of Amazon Health Services, said in a news release. “We want to be one of the companies that helps dramatically improve the healthcare experience over the next several years.” The One Medical deal will place Amazon in the increasingly popular field of primary care. Long viewed as the center of American medicine, the place where patients can talk directly to their doctors about their health, it’s also become ripe for investment in recent years. CVS, UnitedHealthGroup
UNH,
-0.20%,
Walgreens Boots Alliance
WBA,
+0.52%
and Walmart
WMT,
-0.26%
all operate clinics that offer primary-care services. That said, …