Can Groupon Replace Health Insurance?

A recent article by BenefitsPro highlighted the growing trend of uninsured using daily deal sites for healthcare. You don’t need an article to know that this is on the rise – my inbox is regularly flooded with dental offers, skin care regiments, and other health services. In fact, the article says nearly 10% of daily deals last November were health or medical related.

There are certainly benefits to these deals. Consumers, especially those without insurance, have access to common healthcare procedures at a lower cost. As with any daily deal, businesses also benefit by using this as a platform to find and retain new customers.

Unfortunately, I see plenty of disadvantages that could hurt the customer in the long run. First, while customers clearly benefit from lower cost preventative services, many of the deals are for more expensive treatments or cosmetic procedures (e.g., laser eye surgery). These may require the customer to have screenings and a full understanding of the treatment. But with a ticking clock urging them to buy before the deal expires, some customers may make impulse decisions. Best case, they’re out several hundred dollars. Worst case, they put their health at serious risk.

Second, a doctor or center that agrees to discount services may not have a high degree of quality or experience. Clearly customers need to have the right expectations for what they’re getting, but there’s also a moral question of whether deal sites have the responsibility ensure their products meet certain standards.

Third, one benefit of insurance is that the provider can use data from doctors to track a patient’s health and proactively screen for any issues. When a consumer relies on Groupon, they are bypassing this system by running from doctor to doctor. Obviously this is tricky as is with the uninsured, but could be more so with these price sensitive customers.

That said, I think the daily deal model could work under the right circumstances. I could see something like this being valuable for the individual exchanges that will be created through the Affordable Care Act. Customers going through these exchanges will already be cost conscious, and, if the individual mandate stands, they will be forced to purchase insurance. A provider could partner with a daily deal site and promote offers targeted to its members that go above and beyond their coverage, providing more value to the customer. This type of arrangement could provide the oversight and quality assurance missing from daily deals today while not eliminating any of the benefits.