Twelve of the deans leading the nation’s top public health schools have written to President Barack Obama to condemn the use of public health programs as cover for covert activities.

In 2011, it was reported that the Central Intelligence Agency utilized a vaccination program as cover to confirm the whereabouts of Osama bin Ladin in Abottabad, Pakistan. Since then, health workers have been targeted for violence throughout the country, with over a dozen murdered in the past three weeks alone. The upswing in violence caused the United Nations to suspend their vaccine work in December, while the covert operation itself led the Pakistani government to kick out the NGO Save the Children in Sept. 2012.

In the course of the one-page letter, the deans or such schools as Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and UCLA take the President and the administration to task for their role in the spreading mistrust of health workers, and close with an impassioned plea to prevent further uses of health programs for intelligence-gathering:

Independent of the Geneva Conventions of 1949, contaminating humanitarian and public health programs with covert activities threatens the present participants and future potential of much of what we undertake internationally to improve health and provide humanitarian assistance. As public health academic leaders, we hereby urge you to assure the public that this type of practice will not be repeated.

International public health work builds peace and is one of the most constructive means by which our past, present, and future public health students can pursue a life of fulfillment and service. Please do not allow that outlet of common good to be closed to them because of political and/or security interests that ignore the type of unintended negative public health impacts we are witnessing in Pakistan.

The letter specifically refers to a recent spike in treatable diseases run rampant in Pakistan, following the surge in suspicion towards vaccination programs and the workers who administer them. In particular, have measles have jumped from 4,000 in 2011 to 14,000 in 2012. Likewise, Pakistan is one of only three countries where polio remains endemic, a statistic that will be unlikely to change should attacks on health workers continue.

In a striking example of the intersection between America’s broken health care system and 21st century information technology, doctors and dentists are successfully luring younger Americans between the ages of 20 and 40 into purchasing online coupons for their health care needs, Kaiser Health News reports.

The coupons tend to attract younger patients looking for one-off services that don’t require much follow up. Tellingly, even though many of these Americans already possess private insurance, the online deals are more generous than their benefits:

Health and medical deals make up about 5 to 10 percent of the online coupon industry, according to Unaiz Kabani, data product manager at Yipit, a service that aggregates companies’ daily deals. Groupon, the market leader, had about 115 million subscribers in 2011, which he says are mostly 20- to 40-year-old college-educated women. Living Social says it has about 70 million members.

Health providers often see good results after an initial offer, but the patients who come in for treatment frequently don’t return.

“When you’re looking at a demographic that’s young, where some may have insurance, some many not, they’re more inclined to be episodic,” said James Doulgeris, a health care business and marketing strategist at HCP Associates.

He said coupons are often the cheapest option for healthy people who may not need follow-up appointments. Even for those enrolled in a private insurance plan, the cost of using an online deal or a retail clinic may be less than seeing an in-network physician.

ThinkProgress has previously reported on multiple instances of Americans resorting to desperate measures such as online “crowd funding” — in essence, cyber-begging — in order to pay for their medical care. This is as much a testament to the consumer-assisting potential of the Internet as it is an indictment of America’s increasingly costly health care system.

Although many of the Americans utilizing such deals are doing so out of convenience and don’t suffer from recurring or debilitating health problems, the fact that a fair number of them already have private insurance should serve as a warning sign regarding the pitfalls of inadequate coverage. And the problem only gets worse for those with more extensive medical needs. While Obamacare will assist Americans in purchasing private insurance through its federal subsidies, its “essential health benefits” do not encompass several common — and expensive — treatments such as vision care and dental care for adults.