Several Professional Associations have recently launched a formal protest against Groupon, the commercial offers site which is becoming more and more popular in Italy and abroad.
The first complaints came in November from the Medical Association of the province of Bologna when its President Giancarlo Pizza called on all members of the association to have nothing to do with the site. It would appear that offering medical services at knockdown prices is a violation of the Code of Conduct of the medical profession. Those doctors who persist run the risk of facing disciplinary proceedings.
Other Professional Associations soon added their protests to that of the doctors. The Bar Association is in the process of analyzing a number of offers from law consultancy firms which have recently appeared on Groupon, in order to discover whether any of their members are involved. Andrea Mascherin, secretary of the National Bar Council expressed his alarm in an interview with the Italian newspaper Il Fatto Quotidiano: “From a cultural point of view it is extremely risky to pass off the idea that fundamental rights such as health and legal defense can be treated in the same way as pots and pans and mattresses “
Both the Architects Association and the Engineers Association have joined in the chorus of protest in stressing that the race to lower prices may very well correspond to a general lowering of the quality of work done by professionals.
In response to these statements, Groupon’s lawyer has argued that the current Italian legal system also allows doctors to make promotional offers and has stated to the press that “The rules of the Association’s Code of Conduct have lower status than the national rules.”
It is for this reason that Groupon, which makes no secret of the fact that it has identified health coupons as the main attraction for users, decided to file a report with the Antitrust Body against those provincial Medical Associations that bar their members from proposing commercial offers on the site.
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