Don’t Let Dental Insurers Dictate Your Care

A dental plan helps cover part of the cost of dental care – it does not cover the full cost of the specific treatment you require. Dental insurance is designed as supplement to your co-payment and will pay a percentage of the dentist’s bill, not the entire bill.

Some plans will only provide the level of benefit allowed for the least expensive way to treat a dental need, regardless of the most effective treatment required. Utilize your insurance as a benefit to help cover the costs involved.

The plan was never intended as written by the insurance company to cover 100 percent of everyone’s dental needs. Don’t allow your dental plan to dictate the care you receive. Some dental plans exclude necessary dental treatment such as sealants, orthodontics, and crowns and bridges. Not doing recommended dentistry because insurance won’t cover it can only harm you and let conditions worsen in your mouth.

If you expect your insurance to cover it all and choose to not do completely and totally what your dentist recommends, you will be putting your dental health in jeopardy. Only your dentist can provide you with a treatment plan with your health in mind. It is not the insurance company‘s job to do so.

Insurance company’s primary concern is to make a dividend or profit for its stockholders. Therefore, the more dollars they keep, the more successful they are. Insurance companies can keep their dollars intact in many ways. To name a few:

Offering coverage at several payment levels.

Paying less than the dentist fees.

How To Deal With Dental Exclusions

Now that January is here, those of you lucky enough to have dental insurance through work know that you usually have a maximum cap of $1000-$2000 to spend on dental work throughout the calendar year 2009. However, this money allotment is usually for preventative (exams, x-rays, cleanings, etc.) or restorative (fillings, caps, root canals, etc.) dental care.

But what are you going to do if the work you need done in your teeth is not covered by your insurance company? Dental insurance policies often contain large exclusions that could leave you on your own to pay for extremely expensive treatments, such as orthodontic braces, veneers, implants or bridges?

In such cases have your best bet would be to purchase a discount dental plan because this type of coverage does not contain any health, age or pre-existing condition exclusions and provide discounts for almost every type of dental procedure. These types of plans can say you anywhere from 20% to 50% off the regular retail price of “excluded procedures”, even blatantly cosmetic ones such as teeth whitening.

Before choosing an insurance policy or discount dental plan for yourself and your family, be careful to make sure that the plan you choose covers all the procedures that you are likely to need. Thankfully my web site, Discount Dental 4 U provides you with the information you need on discount dental plans to make a smart, informed purchasing decision.