What Are My Choices for Dental Coverage?

As I have written earlier, there are basically 4 types of offerings: Traditional, HMO, PPO, and Capitation. You find that the only choices you have are not the best, what do you do? You want to stay with your dentist for many years but he is not “on your plan”. What do you do? There is a reason he is not on that discount plan just as there is a reason you don’t want your paycheck reduced. You have fixed overhead, so does the dentist. If your pay goes down by 18-30%, what adjustments will you make? Buy cheaper food, no movies, less shopping, and the list goes on. What will your dentist do? Either retire if he is old enough, layoff staff, use cheaper materials, sell himself to the discount chains and/or increase the patient flow. But we are in a time when dental patients are not knocking down our doors, so he has to revert to the options listed before that.

Your choice is simple, choose to help discount dentistry survive by leaving your dentist for a cheaper one, or stay with your dentist and pay the larger out of the pocket expense. There are too few ethical dentists left today. Many in our field have already sold themselves out to the dental chains because their patients have left for the discount. You cannot get the best quality of care that way. The choice is yours, make it intelligently not emotionally.

It is NOT TRUE that you have to go to a listed dentist on your plan. You still have free choice, please use it before you lose it. If you go to a non-network dentist, you will pay a higher c0-pay but will most likely get the highest standard of care. We have committed to only offer the highest standard of care and so we have picked HRI, Delta Premier and Anthem 330 as the plans we recommend. If those are not offered by your employer, talk to HR and see if it can change when they select the plan next time.