http://www.nahu.org/legislative/discountplans.pdf
is a website address that gives a position paper by a lobbying group for health insurance industry that Opposes medical discount cards. These cards are less present in the marketplace than they should be. The premise is simple, you pay for the card and you get a discount of the cost of certain health care and services or products.
You probably don't have to be a rocket scientist to predict what the paper says, the National Association of Health Underwriters is against stand-alone discount cards. Naturally, they also highlight that such "discounts" are part and parcel options for certain health insurance plans.
The paper points out facts about medical discount cards: They are not insurance, they may be sponsored by fly by night companies and the cost of the card itself may not make sense in terms of what they offer discounts on. However, the paper is not persuasive in extinguishing the concept of the medical discount card, mostly because of the health insurance industry itself. The health insurance industry, motivated by profit, has increased its own share of health care dollars by covering less for more money. Instead of trying to extinguish the competition, perhaps the medical discount card companies should be expanding, offering routine medical care from providers at a reduced cost. In a way, the concept returns to an idea that made group health insurance historically a better way for people to get health insurance through the power of numbers: you will have access to our client base of x people if you accept less than the going rate for medical care.
If the medical discount companies are smart and not too greedy, they can increase their marketshare by backtracking in the health insurance company footsteps before health insurance companies became exploitive money machines that provided less for more money.
