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Statement on Amazon Scooping Up Americans' Health Data Through Purchase of One Medical
"U.S. enforcement agencies should block this deal. They should also move swiftly to establish a basic set of rules to protect every corner of America’s health industry from the power of the manipulation platforms."
WASHINGTON
Amazon today announced plans to buy 1Life Healthcare Inc, which provides health care services in 12 U.S. cities, under the name One Medical. Amazon agreed to pay $3.9 billion for the business. In response, Open Markets Institute Executive Director Barry Lynn released the following statement:
"Amazon's takeover of One Medical is the latest shot in a terrifying new stage in the business model of the world's largest corporations. The deal will expand Amazon's ability to collect the most intimate and personal of information about individuals, in order to track, target, manipulate, and exploit people in ever more intrusive ways."
Amazon is not the only dangerous actor here. Google's recent takeover of the fitness tracker Fitbit poses similar threats.
Every American should stand against this radical extension of corporate power into our lives. In addition to manipulating how we talk to one another and do business with one another, Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Apple are moving fast to manipulate our perceptions of our own health and wellbeing.
Every medical professional and medical business in the United States should also play close attention to this deal. Every time Amazon and Google expand their control over the delivery of healthcare to Americans, they also expand their power over doctors, nurses, and rival practitioners.
U.S. enforcement agencies should block this deal. They should also move swiftly to establish a basic set of rules to protect every corner of America's health industry from the power of the manipulation platforms."
Open Markets has warned repeatedly about Amazon's massive - and still growing - ability to surveil its customers and influence our decision-making, including with its purchase of Whole Foods several years ago.
The Open Markets Institute works to address threats to our democracy, individual liberties, and our national security from today's unprecedented levels of corporate concentration and monopoly power. By combining policy, legal, and market structure expertise with sophisticated communications and outreach efforts, Open Markets seeks not only to hold today's monopolies accountable for abuse of power, but to rebuild an economic system where progress is easier to achieve, because power is far more widely and equitably distributed
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"It would be a travesty and subversion of congressional intent to downplay or ignore human rights violations faced by marginalized populations," said a representative from Amnesty International.
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U.S. President Donald Trump's administration earned condemnation from Amnesty International on Thursday over its leaked plans to downplay human rights violations in countries favored by the American government.
News of the plan was originally reported on Wednesday by The Washington Post, which documented how the administration has been revising State Department reports on human rights in El Salvador, Israel, and Russia to "strike all references to LGBTQ+ individuals or crimes against them." The Post also added that "the descriptions of government abuses that do remain have been softened."
In the case of El Salvador, where the administration earlier this year began lawlessly shipping immigrants deported from the United States, the administration's report stated that were "no credible reports of significant human rights abuses" there, even though a State Department report under former President Joe Biden's administration issued last year documented "significant human rights issues" in the country.
Human rights violations against LGBTQ+ people were deleted from the State Department's report on Russia, while the report on Israel deleted references to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's corruption trial and to his government's threats to the country's independent judiciary.
Amanda Klasing, Amnesty International USA's national director of government relations and advocacy, ripped the administration for selectively whitewashing human rights records of nations favored by the president.
"The leaked chapters of the latest Annual Human Rights Report reveal a disturbing effort by the Trump administration to purposefully fail to fully capture the alarming and growing attacks on human rights in certain countries around the globe," she said. "Alarmingly, we understand that the mandate from Secretary Rubio was... to go back and wipe out portions of the reports that had already been written—to delete stories from survivors of human rights violations."
Klasing went on to accuse the administration of turning the human rights report "into yet another tool to obscure facts to push forward anti-rights policy choices."
She also emphasized that "it would be a travesty and subversion of congressional intent to downplay or ignore human rights violations faced by marginalized populations including refugees and asylum seekers, women and girls, Indigenous people, ethnic and religious minorities, and LGBTQI+ people throughout the world."
An unnamed State Department official this week told the Post that the administration was merely simplifying the human rights reports to make them more "readable."
"The 2024 Human Rights report has been restructured in a way that removes redundancies, increases report readability, and is more responsive to the legislative mandate that underpins the report," the official said. "The human rights report focuses on core issues."
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The United Nations' human rights chief warned the move would "result in more massive forced displacement, more killing, more unbearable suffering, senseless destruction, and atrocity crimes."
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Foreign ministers from countries around the world, the United Nations' human rights chief, the families of Israeli hostages, and aid organizations were among those condemning the Israeli security cabinet's approval of a plan early Friday for a full military takeover of Gaza City, a move seen as the opening salvo in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's push for total occupation of the besieged Palestinian enclave.
Netanyahu's office said in a statement that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), which already controls much of the Gaza Strip, "will prepare for taking control of Gaza City while distributing humanitarian assistance to the civilian population outside the combat zones."
Since the Hamas-led attack of October 7, 2023, the Israeli government has systematically obstructed humanitarian aid distribution in Gaza, sparking a growing starvation crisis. The World Health Organization said Thursday that around 12,000 children under the age of five in the strip are suffering from acute malnutrition—a crisis that Israel's newly approved ground operation in Gaza City is likely to worsen.
The Associated Press noted that Gaza City "is one of the few areas in Gaza that hasn’t been turned into an Israeli buffer zone or placed under evacuation orders." An Israeli ground operation in the city "could displace tens of thousands of people and further disrupt efforts to deliver food to the hunger-stricken territory," the outlet added.
Hannah Bond, co-CEO of ActionAid U.K., in a statement on Friday that "this horrifying escalation will forcibly displace hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who are already experiencing starvation and have nowhere else to flee, and will inevitably result in even more bloodshed."
"The U.K. government has condemned this decision," Bond added, "but it should know by now that words are not enough to stop the Israeli authorities from pursuing a course of destruction."
U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer said Israel's plan for Gaza City "will do nothing to bring an end to this conflict or to help secure the release of the hostages."
"It will only bring more bloodshed," he warned.
"Australia calls on Israel to not go down this path, which will only worsen the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza."
Starmer was among many world leaders who spoke out in the wake of the Israeli security cabinet vote, with the foreign ministers of Australia, the Netherlands, Scotland, China, Turkey, and other nations decrying the impending operation as a disaster that could crush any remaining hope of a deal to end the military assault.
"Australia calls on Israel to not go down this path, which will only worsen the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza," said Australian Foreign Affairs Minister Penny Wong. "Permanent forced displacement is a violation of international law."
Citing Israel's continued expansion of military operations in Gaza, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said Friday that his government wouldn't authorize any exports of military equipment that could be used in Gaza "until further notice."
"The even harsher military action by the Israeli army in the Gaza Strip, approved by the Israeli cabinet last night, makes it increasingly difficult for the German government to see how these goals will be achieved," said Merz, referring to a cease-fire and the release of Israeli hostages.
The Hostages and Missing Families Forum, which represents the families of Israeli hostages held in Gaza, issued a scathing statement in response to the cabinet vote, saying the Israeli government has "sentenced the living hostages to death and the fallen hostages to disappearance."
"The cabinet decision to launch the process of occupying the strip," the group added, "is an official declaration of the abandonment of the hostages, while completely ignoring the repeated warnings by the military echelon and the clear desire of most of the public in Israel."
Hamas, which governs Gaza, called Israel's plan to "occupy Gaza City and forcibly evacuate its residents" a "new war crime that the occupation army is preparing to commit against the city and its nearly one million inhabitants."
One voice that was conspicuously absent from the global outrage over Friday's cabinet vote was that of the U.S. government under President Donald Trump, who reportedly does not oppose Netanyahu's plan for full occupation of the Gaza Strip. The U.S. is Israel's top ally and leading supplier of weaponry that has been used extensively to massacre civilians in Gaza.
Citing unnamed sources, Axios reported earlier this week that Trump "has decided not to intervene and to let the Israeli government make its own decisions."
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The Trump Justice Department on Thursday paved the way for yet another corporate merger, this time settling a Biden-era legal challenge that aimed to block UnitedHealth Group from adding the home health and hospice care provider Amedisys to its eye-popping list of subsidiaries.
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The settlement was announced on the same day that Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) launched an investigation into UnitedHealth, specifically probing the company's alleged practice of incentivizing nursing homes to slash patient care costs.
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"It claims to divest home health and hospice care providers in overlapping markets but, in actuality, cedes them to similarly conflicted buyers, including a highly leveraged private equity firm."
The settlement came as the Trump Justice Department is under growing scrutiny for terminating or sidelining top antitrust officials and acquiescing to lobbyists fighting DOJ merger lawsuits.
Last week, as Common Dreams reported, the Justice Department dropped an antitrust case against American Express Global Business Travel, a company that has paid Ballard Partners—Attorney General Pam Bondi's former lobbying firm—hundreds of thousands of dollars this year to pressure the DOJ on antitrust matters.
Ballard has also been paid big money this year by UnitedHealth, far and away the most powerful healthcare company in the U.S. According to a recent analysis by the Center for Health and Democracy, UnitedHealth currently has around 2,700 subsidiaries, giving it a foothold in virtually every aspect of the U.S. healthcare system.
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