News In Healthcare

Pres­i­dent Obama and Con­gress entered marathon nego­ti­a­tions over health reform bills on this day in 2010. Hope­fully those efforts weren’t for noth­ing. More to come on the sta­tus of Health Care Reform as we get closer to the US Supreme Court review­ing the mat­ter in March.

I am lucky. I have pretty good health insur­ance cov­er­age. But I have heard that peo­ple who do not have health insur­ance or those who don’t have great cov­er­age are check­ing web­sites like Groupon or Liv­ing Social for dis­counts for var­i­ous medical/dental ser­vices. Because I am curi­ous by nature, I checked Groupon to see what dis­counts were avail­able in my area. I found that the dis­counts were for mas­sages and cos­metic work. On Liv­ing Social I found dis­counts for den­tal exams in addi­tion to the stan­dard spa services.

It seems the dis­count sites are not yet pop­u­lar for med­ical ser­vices. This may change depend­ing upon the out­come of the US Supreme Court review of the fed­eral health law. In the mean­time, if you need med­ical ser­vices and you don’t have health insur­ance, don’t avoid the doc­tor. Most med­ical providers will offer dis­counts directly to their patients, even with­out a Groupon coupon.

We are about 2 months away to the US Supreme Court hear­ing argu­ments on the con­sti­tu­tion­al­ity of the fed­eral health law. To help keep track of the briefs filed, the news reports and the analy­sis of the argu­ments, Kaiser Health News has put together a site to help us all keep score. If you want to fol­low the case, this site is def­i­nitely worth check­ing out.