Wednesday, August 29, 2012

Health insurers offering coupons for food?

Via Evgeny Morozov, this Washington Post story about food coupons delivered with information from insurers offers a new marketing frontier--deployed here in the interest of better health, although the story notes that many of the products offered are second-best.  "Dreamfields Pasta, a specialty item designed for diabetics, says it gets double the redemption on coupons issued through Linkwell because it puts them in the hands of patients who need to manage their blood sugar. Other, more mainstream, brands such as Quaker Oats and Sargento get a kind of halo effect because coupons for their product are packaged with information from a health-insurance company."  What would happen if a consumer sued, alleging that the products aren't healthy--how if at all could a court take account of this intended and expected halo effect?

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