In her latest installment at TIME Ideas, Shannon Brownlee takes on hospitals that use marketing tactics like offering free screening tests to patients to generate revenue and find new recurring patients, and then claim the cost of those tests as charitable activity to become eligible for billions of dollars in tax breaks. As Brownlee points out, those tactics (minus the tax exemption part) are common across retail--and nobody accuses Amazon of being a charity:
"Hewlett Packard and other manufacturers sell computer printers at rock bottom prices. Once you run out of ink, you find out the cartridge costs almost as much as the printer did. The biggest product launch of last Christmas — Amazon’s Kindle Fire tablet — sold for less than the price of its components, even without accounting for Amazon’s advertising costs. Amazon makes it up on the e-books, TV shows, and Amazon Prime subscriptions purchased by Fire users."
You can read the full piece here: http://ideas.time.com/2012/02/13/direct-marketing-and-deep-discounts-come-to-health-care/#ixzz1mHdv3qXb
Join the Conversation
Please log in below through Disqus, Twitter or Facebook to participate in the conversation. Your email address, which is required for a Disqus account, will not be publicly displayed. If you sign in with Twitter or Facebook, you have the option of publishing your comments in those streams as well.