As a patient - there are some things that you don't want to go cheap on. Your eye care is one of them.
As a practitioner - this doesn't make terribly great business sense. Some people (especially in the LASIK world) try to bump up their revenue by dropping their margins with gimmicks like coupons hoping to do more bulk volume. This leads to higher overhead costs (for example, you have to hire more staff to process these extra patients). If there is ever a downturn in the market, you lose that volume. Now with this unusually excessive overhead and very poor margins, the system just busts.