Amazon Healthcare: A Time Whose Idea May Come

Did you like that headline? Maybe you’ll like this subhead, too.

By Ed Goldman

News that Amazon is getting into healthcare in a major way must have hospitals and clinics as wary as they were when the megalithic monster wreaked havoc on book stores, video rental shops and even some grocery outlets, systematically hobbling then gobbling them up

To be sure, Amazon did it by offering lower prices for everything imaginable, based on the Machiavellian business model that largely eluded other companies: give people more for less money and do it more quickly. 

What a concept.

Nevertheless, the Amazon prototype, which involves creating enough data on each of us to render the religious notion of Free Choice kind of cute, may create questionable advertising practices (now, there’s a marvelously redundant phrase).

Here are five customer recruitment approaches that have crossed our desk:

1. If you already have Crohn’s disease, you’ll love diverticulitis!

2. Adult-onset diabetes? Why not get ahead of the pack with our new Infant Diabetes Enhancers (IDEs), a scientifically proven method of getting toddlers hooked on sugar by introducing Nestle’s Quik chocolate mix into store-bought breast milk. Moms will love the energy bursts coming from their five-week-olds, who may even begin forming words at a much earlier age—like ‘More!’ and ‘Fructose!’ Ask your pediatrician if sugar-coated babies are right for you! Sprinkle some in your child’s formula and applesauce—but not in the oatmeal. For some reason, the chemical reaction is unstable. Here’s an easy way to remember: Beware the IDEs in Mush.

3. Does your Hepatitis A coverage include Medicare-approved Hep B and Hep C? If not, Amazon can help with our new all-inclusive supplemental medical policy, Cirrhosis A Rose Is A Rose. Call our robotic operator now and say, ‘I have Hep!’ You’ll either immediately be transferred to our live chat portal or transported to a 1958 beatnik poetry reading in New York’s East Village.

4. Since you enjoyed the drone delivery of generic pills to reverse your erectile dysfunction, we think you’ll be thrilled to know we can also do drone deliveries of soft-porn books, movies and, heh-heh, graphic novels—as well as, for just a few dollars more, retired sex workers specializing in all acknowledged genders, orientations and fabrics. (Need to pay a little at a time? Ask about our lay-awake policies!)

5. Are you…COVID-Curious? Do you think you may have it—but faint at the mere thought of putting a Q-tip in your nose (even though most of your paychecks went there in the cocaine-mad 1980s)?