Amazon is pushing deeper into healthcare with new fixed pricing for treatment of certain conditions including erectile dysfunction and hair loss. Under the new scheme, Prime members can see the cost of a telehealth visit and their desired treatment upfront, so they can decide whether they want to go through with it before scheduling a telehealth appointment. CNBC earlier reported on the news.
The initial video consultation costs $49, or $29 for messaging where that’s allowed. In terms of pricing for medication, anti-aging skincare medication will run $10 a month while erectile dysfunction will cost $19 a month. Other treatments with upfront pricing include those for motion sickness at $2 per use, hair loss at $16 a month, and eyelash growth, which will run you $43 a month. There are treatments available for more than 30 common conditions, but only those five have upfront pricing for now. The pricing will show up at checkout when users are logged into Amazon with a Prime membership.
Amazon acquired primary care provider One Medical for $3.9 billion in 2022, and fills prescriptions through Amazon Pharmacy. Medications are packaged in standard Amazon packaging, so nobody will know you’re ordering boner pills.
Healthcare has been a big area of interest for Amazon. It’s understandable, as here in the United States, healthcare is of course not free but rather a multi-trillion dollar business.
The company in 2022 paid almost $4 billion to acquire primary care provider One Medical, and shelled out $750 million in 2019 for PillPack, a company that pre-sorts and delivers medications for people who manage multiple medications at the same time. Besides a new, potentially lucrative stream of revenue, the upfront pricing for Prime members could help with subscriber retention if members become accustomed to using Amazon for their medications. People don’t want to change where they get their medications very often.
Amazon’s competitors in telehealth have understandably not weathered the news well. Hims & Hers, which offers similar medications prescribed over the internet, cratered more than 20% today on Amazon’s announcement.
Other retailers have similarly moved into healthcare. CVS, Safeway, and Walgreens all have pharmacy businesses—CVS sees nearly 70% of its revenue, or almost $200 billion, come from prescribing drugs.
Safeway and Walgreens invested hundreds of millions into Theranos, the blood testing startup that turned out to be a fraud. They had big dreams of making potentially billions in dollars off providing finger-prick blood tests that could run hundreds of tests, but in the end were forced to pay customers tens of millions in damages after it was discovered the tests they received were faulty.
Of course, it’s unfortunate that Americans have to pay so much for healthcare. But look on the bright side, at least Prime is only $14.99 a month. Besides the cost of the consultation and the medication, there are no other fees to getting prescriptions from Amazon.
