Hearing Amazon’s Footsteps, the Health Care Industry Shudders
“The pharmacy business was always a topic of interest when I was with Amazon,
and there was a sincere desire on the part of Amazon to create a better customer experience across pharmacy and health care as a whole,” he said.
“My advice is that executives at pharmaceutical companies should crush all assumptions when it comes to Amazon
and their ability to enter, innovate and reimagine the pharmacy business and health care,” he said.
In Connecticut, for example, the license is for “wholesale of drugs, cosmetics
and medical devices,” while in Louisiana it was granted to a “drug or device distributor.”
Brian Tanquilut, an analyst for Jefferies, noted that the company acquired many of the wholesale pharmacy licenses between fall of last year
and early this year, around when the company started selling medical supplies to businesses.
Expanding the pharmacy business without the aid of a major pharmacy-benefit manager would be tough,
because the benefit managers serve as gatekeepers to insured patients, deciding which pharmacies they can and cannot use.
To do this, Amazon would need retail pharmacy licenses in every state — a hurdle, certainly, but not an insurmountable one, the analysts said.
If Amazon wanted to go bigger, Ms. Gupte and others said, it could sell to insured customers
and even serve as a pharmacy-benefit manager, overseeing drug coverage for people on behalf of insurers and large employers.
“It’s not evidence of a retail entry into the pharmacy business,” he said.