Connect • Contribute • Care

Insurance is often a wonderful thing. Dental insurance is a different thing. You might want to reassess how it affects your dental care choices.

First, dental insurance often caps its yearly payments at $1,000. What if you need $10,000 in dental care: many worn, broken, loose teeth throughout your mouth?

You could wait and do some each year over a 12 to 15 year time period. Part of that $1,000 each year goes to your regular preventive visits so you would not get to use all of it to repair the damage.

If you do it over many years rather than all at once, you might be wasting your money - because damaged teeth end up causing more damage to other teeth. This turns into revolving door for eternity dentistry.

Second, dental insurance is not like medical insurance. Most medical insurance covers preventive visits AND various expensive advanced therapies, which can run into hundreds of thousands of dollars (of course you might pay a percentage of that).

This means that if your teeth have severe problems you would be out of luck after your cap is hit. Except for a few stopgap measures, dental insurance would be of little help.

Third, dental insurance has a huge gap in its coverage.

Once you lose all your teeth, you might get your dentures for minimum or no out of pocket obligations, but dental insurance won't get you enough to stop any precipitous decline. For example, if your teeth are starting to loosen and fall out or are so worn they hurt and are close to falling apart.

Dental insurance only covers one or two teeth repairs (in most cases) and then when all your teeth are gone it might cover those glued in but slipping (next to your bed in glass) dentures.

But what about a plan to stop the decline before it is past the point of no return or if you want your smile restored to lifelike look, function and feel?

Finally, dentists with advanced training offer a "look into your oral health future" evaluation. Then they recommend a treatment plan to restore your smile to its youthful vigor.

Dental insurance is often unprepared to offer anything substantial if you want to go in this advanced direction.

Dental insurance is basically set up to handle maintenance--fix only what they consider is broken--even if they are stuck the old therapy concepts and insurance coverage dollars of the 1970s.

If you only access the care your insurance covers, you are not going to get much more than emergency based (one-tooth-at-a-time) dentistry.

Dental Insurance Conclusion

No one wants to get oversold dentistry or pay too much, but you also don’t want your health to suffer just because your dental insurance is inadequate for the real world.

Over ten years ago I hit a deer with my car - it took out my front quarter panel. The fee to repair it was over $1500. My insurance paid everything but $250. They would have paid much more. Of course, I was paying hundreds of dollar per year (out of my own pocket) to get this coverage (and my employer covered nothing).

Now l liked that vehicle a lot, but is it worth more than my mouth and oral health?

If I smashed my mouth up in a car accident, my medical, dental or car insurance would probably cover my dental injuries. However, a slow decline to dentures is a calamity I can and should avoid.

The CHOICE: Either drop the dental insurance reliance "old time dentistry" perspective or keep driving fast past deer crossing signs and access that no out-of-pocket option.

To improve the likelihood of getting the no out-of-pocket, completely restored smile option; disable your airbag, unbuckle your seatbelt and smile as if you really liked reading your insurance coverage documents!

-- You might want to also consider that many dentists work faster because of how some dental plans require them to hold down fees to be part of their "preferred provider" network. Imagine that - getting less and having it done faster than it should be. Chew on that rotten apple for a bit.

Dental Commentary
By RAC
dentalblogger.com

Connect - Care - Contribute