24
votes
Amazon One Medical telehealth provider sued for US patient death
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- Title
- Opinion | I'm an emergency physician. The modern telehealth model should have all of us concerned.
- Published
- Dec 28 2024
- Word count
- 1097 words
This is tragic and disgusting, and I desperately hope the victim's family can get some recompense in the courts. I wish I could be confident that the legal system would punish Amazon enough that it would not be more profitable for them to run the company this way and soak up the costs from the occasional lawsuit.
Yes, but… why was Amazon the first medical service this man who was literally coughing up blood turned to in the first place? Why, oh why, would this diabetic man experiencing all of this horrific-ness say to himself, ‘Gee, you know what? I’ll choose Amazon to help me!’?
Hhmmmm. Oh well. Guess it’ll just have to remain a mystery.
I don't know how sarcastic you're being, but he may have worked for them, meaning that they were fully covered or that he was strongly encouraged to go to their medical services first. Walmart does/did something similar.
I had a similar thought initially. If I was coughing up blood and my feet were blue… I would’ve gone to the emergency room.
However the onus is still on the healthcare professional for not immediately directing this man to do that and instead telling him to purchase an inhaler. I don’t know everything about this guy’s life and I can’t just make assumptions about his mental state or his ability to safely get to an urgent care or a hospital. What I may have done in that situation may not have been feasible for him for any number of reasons.
This is the part that sinks Amazon, the healthcare professional not directing someone to seek more appropriate care. From what I had seen a few months ago when I was looking up these online telehealth services and what not, I think all of them I had looked at had specifically said on the website that it only covered certain conditions and if you had anything more serious you would need to seek other care elsewhere.
With healthcare as fucked up as it is, someone trying to use telehealth services for such a serious condition doesn't surprise me that much. An emergency room visit could be a 4+ hour wait depending on what your condition is and your location etc. and it's easy to reason yourself into hoping that whatever is happening to you might not be that serious because if it is serious then you're fucked anyhow. There's also the possibility that people might go to it hoping that the professional can tell them that there is actually a simple solution and it works and prevents a more expensive ER visit, but they probably expect that the healthcare professional on the telehealth services will tell them it's too serious for them to help if it actually is.
I can tell you're being sarcastic, but it comes off like you're blaming the victim here. If your comment is intended to point towards the horrifying systemic financial reasons that Americans avoid emergency care, I think it could be made a bit clearer.