Dental Plans Versus Dental Insurance
One of your initial challenges when trying to find a way to reduce your overall dental costs is to try and figure out what type of coverage is better for you – dental plans or dental insurance.
When most people think of dental care they think of insurance, which is a hangover from thirty years ago when the only type of coverage you could buy is the traditional form of dental insurance. Also life was a lot easier back then. Employers got huge tax breaks for creating these types of plans and most people got coverage the day they were hired, either through a group plan or through paying a small fee. Lots of things have changes since the fabulous fifties and recent studies show that most people go without dental care because they can’t afford dental coverage. How bad is it? Seven out of ten people don’t have any type of dental plan or dental insurance at all.
One of the reasons that these statistics are so bad is that dental insurance isn’t as affordable fro either you or your employer these days. Problems range from no or minimal tax breaks for employers to start group or reimbursement plans, ridiculously low caps on what is covered, no coverage for pre-existing conditions, a long waiting period for insurance to kick in for expensive treatments and no coverage at all for many of the services that are required by the elderly such as dentures and implants. Another problem is that the annual premiums can be well over three hundred dollars a month for an excellent family plan.
Dental discount plans were introduced several years ago as an alternative to insurance. You join the plan, which is usually very inexpensive and you may then visit any dentist in that plans network of approved dentists. It is like belonging to a discount club. This is a group of dentist’s that have agreed to accept reduced payment for services performed. Mostly they do this under the condition that the work is paid for at the time of the visit so it is a way of them getting cash upfront rather than waiting to be paid by insurance companies.
Many dentists prefer being on a dental discount plan, as being paid through traditional insurance often requires that they fill out a lot of forms. It can also take them a long time to get reimbursed for the plan. Often they end up financing the patient’s dental work while they wait to be paid. It usually takes a dentist anywhere from 45 to 90 days to be reimbursed by a company. Unfortunately some of the time the dentist is never paid, even after the work has been completed as the insurance company can maintain all kinds of things including the claim that the person was no longer covered at the time of treatment or that a clerical error of some kind made the entire claim invalid. Given these drawbacks for the dental professional you can easily see why many of them prefer to be paid by customers that have dental discount plans as they simply get paid faster and with no hassle.