Why is dental insurance so lousy?
A main reason dental insurance doesn’t work on an individual basis is that people are savvy consumers when it comes to dental work. If you know you’re going to have to have a crown, you’ll put it off until you have coverage. This is why individual coverage is so watered down (with waiting period for major services, etc.). An insurer will not sell a company dental insurance unless it is a mandatory add-on for all employees who take medical insurance, because if they made it optional, only the people planning on major dental work like bridges and braces would take it. Everybody else would decline, figuring, like you, that the annual cost is about what you’d spend at the dentist anyway, on average. This is absolutely not true. A lot of companies tie dental to medical but it’s not because the insurance company makes them. (That is often true for vision plans, by the way, but not dental). Insurance companies do have some underwriting provisions in group plans to prevent people electing cove
I’ve found discount programs to be more valuable than dental insurance – at least for a self-employed person like me. I belong to some scheme where i pay 14 dollars a month and all my dental procedures are half off. So for $168 I save 400 dollars on a root canal – i have a lot of major work coming up this year, so it’s definitely worth it. With insurance, i’d pay about the same in a year and still only get about half off. So it’s basically the same system – just less paperwork.
The answers above coincide with what I’ve been told by insurers when negotiating corporate dental contracts. An insurer will not sell a company dental insurance unless it is a mandatory add-on for all employees who take medical insurance, because if they made it optional, only the people planning on major dental work like bridges and braces would take it. Everybody else would decline, figuring, like you, that the annual cost is about what you’d spend at the dentist anyway, on average. (Or they’re the ones who stay away from the dentist entirely.
I have often wondered about this myself since I have the same lousy insurance [you pay $200/year, you get max. $700/year] and I wonder if it has to do with the holistic nature of dentistry [like how could you tell if something is a pre-existing condition, or part of the same problem or issue… it’s very hard to do], the fixed costs of a lot of the materials, the difficulty in drawing lines between cosmetic dentistry and problem-fixing dentistry, and the fact that anyone who would make money from dental insurance is already stinking rich from being in the health insurance business. I was on the board of directors of a community health clinic in Seattle that did dental work as well as medical work and was always amazed at both the high cost of dental procedures as well as the nearly complete absence of low-cost or sliding scale dental options. For people without health care, there are often clinics or emergency rooms as a last resort but if you have a dental crisis, you’re SOL.
