Last Thursday, Amazon announced that it would purchase One Medical, a private equity-backed network of primary-care clinics, for $3.9 billion. It’s part of the company’s concerted effort to capture the health care market. Given that health care represents about one-sixth of the U.S. economy, it would be impossible for Amazon to realize its goal of sitting in between every economic transaction without getting involved in medicine. “We think healthcare is high on the list of experiences that need reinvention,” is the more euphemistic way that one of their senior vice presidents put it.

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In addition to creating the potential for self-preferencing its own doctors, providers, and pharmacies, consolidating data can, as Krista Brown of the American Economic Liberties Project notes, add security risks. Hackers only have to be right once to crack AWS and gain access to a large trove of health data. Amazon’s data security practices have come into question in the past.

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