Affordable Health Care on 50% off Daily Deal Coupons (How Low Can Healthcare Get?)

How do you know that the health care system in this country is broken? You know when people go shopping for affordable health care on daily deal sites like Groupon.

Daily deal sites - the way you get half off hot stone massages, hotel rooms and restaurant meals if you are willing to take advantage of your purchase in the time you're given. How does it sound buying 50%-off coupons for dental checkups or eye care appointments? You'd think that people would be completely put off by such tasteless commercialization when it came to taking care of their health. But apparently, people have long since been numbed to this kind of thing. There have been more than 5000 medical and dental daily deals published this year alone. And that's compared to just a couple of hundred last year.

Not that one doesn't understand the appeal. In a time when affordable health care is extremely difficult to come by and when you can spend thousands of dollars on the most basic kinds of healthcare requirements, 50% off deals can seem like a godsend to many families. One out of two Americans wears prescription glasses for eyesight correction today. Glasses can be terribly expensive - a pair of glasses together with an eye exam can end up costing $400. So when an optician advertises a $50 deal for an eye exam and a couple of hundred dollars off prescription eyeglasses, what is a family that's caught up in this economy supposed to do? Thousands of people are buying into these kinds of deals on GroupOn. Dentists have been announcing 80% off on dental x-rays, examinations and cleaning. In an economy where most people don't have dental insurance, this can seem like a terrific deal.

Medical organizations though are worried about how unhealthy this trend is. When it's your health, you need to be careful and make decisions with your head and not with your wallet. When a healthcare provider announces a big deal, people often just sign up without thinking that much about the kind of quality that's on offer. This isn't just a wasted massage by an incompetent masseur or a poor quality meal at a restaurant. These are procedures that involve vital organs. Why, laser skin or Botox treatments that go with 50% off can easily involve inexperienced technicians who use their lasers or their syringes to dangerous effect.

Then of course, there's the whole danger of being drawn in for the upsell. With many healthcare providers, the whole point of offering an affordable health care coupon is finding a way to scare any patient who comes in into accepting all kinds of expensive treatments. A dentist may make it sound really urgent that a person gets expensive crown work.

At least the American Society of Plastic Surgeons has the class to stay away from daily deal sites through an official policy announcement.