Meet Amazon Prime, Your New Healthcare Delivery Service!
Sadly, DoorDash and Domino’s weren’t available…
By Ed Goldman
Welcome to 2024! My first New Year’s resolution is to have Amazon become my healthcare benefits provider!
As you may know, the company is offering a benefits package via its Amazon Prime platform—the same one you would use to buy books, CDs, DVDs, groceries, kitchen utensils, clothes, baby products, consumer electronics, beauty products, industrial and scientific supplies, jewelry and watches, lawn and garden items and, of course, musical instruments.
Amazon grace
So I guess the marketing geniuses at Amazon figured, “Hey, why not also throw root-canal jobs, cataract surgery, kidney dialysis, and chemotherapy into the mix?”
Unfortunately, if you missed it, I said Amazon Prime is the platform you would use to buy all this merch. I’m not a member of Amazon—neither Amazon Prime nor, if they exist, Amazon Choice, Amazon Chuck nor Amazon Stew Meat. I never have been. In fact, since Amazon began—the company and possibly the eponymous river—I’ve bought precisely nothing from the service. Nil. Zip. Nada. Bubkis.
Oh, I tried. Once. I was about to make a speech to a Rotary Club in a rural town and tried to buy 15 copies of my own book (“And Now, With Further Ado,” the second of three published by the Sacramento Business Journal). It took only three short hours I’ll never get back and seemed to involve a number of codes, retyping my email address six times and fending off algorithm upsells, telling me if I liked this book (my own) I’d like others in a similar vein.
If you’re wondering why I even was ordering the books, it’s because I’d learned it was a good idea to have a few of these in tow just in case the speech went well and the audience had a sudden need to take home and read some of the same jokes they’d just heard. Since there were 150 people in the room—I think the organizers had quietly offered free beer to goose attendance—you might think I was being modest by bringing only 15 books.
But, truth be told, I sold exactly seven that day—and was glad of it. In fact, to be even truthier, when I started to sign the two copies a woman was purchasing, she actually slammed her hand down hard on mine, evidently to prevent my defacing the book. I had to wear a Carpal Tunnel wrist brace for two weeks, as well as answer snarky questions from friends about when I’d decided to become a supermarket cashier.
Anyway, the imagery being conjured up by Amazon delivering healthcare services verges on the clinically insane. I anticipate the following:
ME (Opening my front door in response to a feverish knocking): Yes?
DELIVERY GUY: Hi. I’m here from Amazon Prime. (Looks up, nervously) I have a kidney dialysis machine attached to a drone hovering about 100 feet above us.
ME: Why?
DELIVERY GUY: Your physician recommended you start undergoing dialysis.
ME: I haven’t seen my physician in months.
DELIVERY GUY (Looking up): I’m, uh, not sure how long that little drone can hold the dialysis machine, sir. I also have another drone on the way carrying a technician to run the dialysis machine.
ME: I can appreciate you dilemma, pal, but—
DELIVERY GUY: We even brought a home-dialysis machine thinking that would weigh less than the hospital kind. But it’s still about 160 pounds.
ME: What about the technician?
DELIVERY GUY: Oh, just about 128 pounds. She’s kind of lithe. We thought that’d be smart.
ME: I’m sure you did. Look, are you sure you have the right name and address?
DELIVERY GUY: You’re Alberto Paco Hernandez. 5276 Bonita Lane, Palm Desert. Am I right?
ME: Not even a little bit.
DELIVERY GUY (Looking up): Uh-oh. Gotta run. The drone seems to be encountering some turbulence. I’m going to direct it to a nearby schoolyard. (He fusses with a very large cellphone I hadn’t seen) There!
ME: I hope school’s out.
DELIVERY GUY: Of course it is. And lemme tell you, when the people arrive there tomorrow, they’re gonna find they can start offering K-6 classes in advanced nephrology. Right on the soccer field.
ME: What about the guy expecting the dialysis machine—Mister Hernandez?
DELIVERY GUY (Leaving my doorstep): Oh, we’ll take care of him. We’ll send him a note saying, “If you liked ordering our dialysis machine, we have an MRI and CT-scanner just waiting for you if you use this code.”
ME: Hey, why not throw in a copy of one of my books?
DELIVERY GUY: Sorry. Wrong algorithm.
Ed Goldman's column appears almost every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. A former daily columnist for the Sacramento Business Journal, as well as monthly columnist for Sacramento Magazine and Comstock’s Business Magazine, he’s the author of five books, two plays and one musical (so far).
