NEW YORK – The last time Mark Stella went to the dentist he didn’t need an insurance card. Instead, he pulled out a Groupon.
Stella, a small business owner, canceled his health insurance plan more than three years ago when his premium rose to more than $400 a month. He considered himself healthy and decided that he was wasting money on something that he rarely used.
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So when a deal popped up on daily deals site Groupon for a teeth cleaning, exam and an X-ray at a nearby dentist, Stella, 55, bought the deal — which the company calls a “Groupon” — for himself and another for his daughter. He paid $39 for each, $151 below what the dentist normally charges.
Daily deal sites like Groupon and LivingSocial are best known for offering limited-time discounts on a variety of discretionary goods and services including restaurant meals, wine tastings, spa visits and hotel stays.
The discounts are paid for upfront and then it’s up to the customer to book an appointment and redeem a coupon before it expires.
Merchants like the deals because it gives them exposure and a pop in business. Customers use them to try something new, to save money on something they already use, or both.
The sites are increasingly moving beyond little luxuries like facials and vacations and offering deals that are helping some people fill holes in their health insurance coverage.
Visitors to these sites are finding a growing number of markdowns on health care services such as teeth cleanings, eye exams, chiropractic care and even medical checkups.
They’re also offering deals on elective procedures not commonly covered by health insurers, such as wrinkle-reducing Botox injections and vision-correcting Lasik eye surgery. About one out of every 11 deals offered online is for a health care service, according to DealRadar.com, a site that gathers and lists 20,000 deals a day from different websites.
“I was accustomed to going to the dentist every six months,” said Stella, who owns SmartPhones, a store and wholesale business in Miami. “This filled the gap.”
The deals are popping up across the nation. In New York, a full medical checkup with blood, stool and urinalysis testing sold for $69 in December on Groupon — below the regular price of $200. In Seattle, a flu shot was offered on AmazonLocal for $17, down from $35. In Chicago, LivingSocial sold a dental exam, cleaning, X-rays and teeth whitening trays for $99, a savings of $142.
About 9 percent of all offers on daily deal websites in November were for dental work or some kind of medical treatment, up from 4.5 percent in the beginning of 2011, said Dan Hess, CEO and founder of Local Offer Network, which runs DealRadar.com.
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