Delta Dental Bites

[plumtreeblossom]

I don't know why I bother having dental insurance when, after this crown goes on, I will have shelled out close to $1K for the crown and root canal. I can't, in my mind, fold that up to make it fit whatsoever under the label of "coverage." Delta Dental doesn't want its members to have their own teeth. If, instead of this restorative work, I had said "Screw it, pull the broken tooth," it would have been covered at 100%.

Comments

[bedfull-o-books.livejournal.com]

That is whacked. (I doubt that they would have paid for the replacement though. A friend of mine had to get a tooth pulled (covered) but then had to pay for a permanent crown. Totally messed up.

[plumtreeblossom.livejournal.com]

I sound like a conspiracy theorist when I say this, but what I really do think is that they would like to encourage as many people as possible to migrate to the denture-wearing stage of their lives as early as possible. I have heard people only a little older than me say that full extraction had been suggested to them. And these were not people with serious mouth problems. My mother was one of them, and a whole mouthful of healthy teeth were extracted along with only two bad ones. If a 50-year-old becomes a denture wearer, he or she will continue to buy dental insurance in case anything goes wrong with the dentures, but things don't usually go wrong with well-fitted dentures, so the insurance company wins.

[daisytells.livejournal.com]

Once a patient has dentures, she ceases to be a patient, and she does not need dental insurance any longer. Besides, some of us cannot afford the premiums and deductibles and co-payments. I had dentists try to talk me out of dentures at age 35, claiming that they could fit me for a nice partial and then root canal and cap the four front teeth - at an astronomical cost and months of visits to the dentist. I chose dentures and have never regretted it, young as I was. Meanwhile, friends of mine who had more money and went the opposite route have since lost teeth and needed to buy expensive partials, which will have to be replaced when other teeth come out. I get the impression that dentists want people to keep coming back. They even try to tell us denture wearers that we need annual checkups -- for what, I ask? Thirty five years later, I am still OK.

[ron_newman]

Does your policy have a really high deductible, so that it only kicks in after that is paid out-of-pocket?

[daisytells.livejournal.com]

For many reasons I opted for false teeth (uppers) at age 35 -- many abcesses, low income, tired of dental emergencies. I did not have another problem for another 25 years, at which time I had the lowers done. No more dental problems, no more dental bills. Every 20-25 years I get new plates made. They look nice, too, lots nicer than my own teeth did -- also feel a helluva lot better. I can eat anything, steak, corn on the cob, name it. I think that modern "restorative" dentistry is OK, if you are willing to settle for a temporary solution (root canals supposedly last about eight years, crowns get lost and need expensive replacements - otherwise the tooth will be lost. For me, it was too much expense and also too much bother. IMHO, what insurance (both medical and dental) has done over the years is make it possible for doctors, hospitals and dentists to raise their prices exponentially, since there is now another to pay the bills. Then they add on deductibles and co-payments, by which the patient ends up paying more proportionately at todays prices than they would have years ago without insurance.
National health care, anyone?