December 20th, 2007
Prepaid health card? Not really.
A healthcare VISA gift card being promoted at Givewell.Com really isn’t.
Well, it isn’t a healthcare card. What it is, Shawn Collins of AffiliateTip writes, is a debit card, loaded by the buyer, which can be redeemed at any merchant which takes Visa. This is revealed in the site’s FAQ.
But it is a nice shade of blue.
Writes Collins:
The recipient could use it for cigarettes, beer, and cookies, as much as for eye exams, co-pays, and emergency care.
The card is being offered by Highmark Inc., a Blue Shield insurance provider in Pennsylvania, which sent out a press release on it in November.
The back-office operation is by MetaBank, based in Iowa. It appears to be a branded version of the bank’s All-Access Visa card.
All this gave Collins a rather clever idea:
Why not position a generic debit card as being a gift card for baseball tickets, scrapbooking, domains, or peanut butter?
It’s a good indication of our anxiety over health care and health care costs that the health care debit card will likely do much better than the one for baseball tickets.
Even if the latter can also be used to buy steroids. With a prescription, of course.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist since 1978, and has covered technology since 1982. He launched the Interactive Age Daily, the first daily coverage of the Internet to launch with a magazine, in September 1994. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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