I have two “Cadillac” dental insurance plans. When I sit down in the chair I just inform them that I am not interested in any service that is not fully covered by my insurances, and if its partially covered, I want a pretty detailed breakdown of why I need it before I will agree to the service.
Dental insurance is sort of crappy in that what we think might be important treatments are sometimes classified as cosmetic and not covered (like implants). This is why there is a cottage industry of dentists doing implants for cheap in Tijuana.
My insurances do a good job of covering things that are related to my oral health. If I want a cosmetic improvement over a covered service, I dont have a problem paying for it. I’d rather the occasional outlay than my dental insurance being prohibitively expensive to account for a possible expensive covered cosmetic change.
What I'm saying is when you have a bad tooth, what do you expect to happen? Insurance pays for you to look like the toothless geezer spitting into the spittoon in old western films. That's the minimum standard of oral care they provide. If you want something as simple as a fake tooth, something i think anyone who gets a tooth extracted would opt to get, its not covered. Why can't I get insurance that covers this? Implants can be a lot of money and as a result there is this cottage industry of people going to other countries for lower priced implants vs having that dental care done where they get all their other dental care done. Just in terms of the carbon footprint alone that's a terrible solution.
Actually…you probably can, but it’s going to be more expensive that you…or your group (if it’s employer provided) will be willing to pay. So in those cases it’s not even offered.
My wife sells dental insurance to businesses. These brokers are doing plan designs that specifically exclude certain services to get monthly costs down to the expected competitive floor pricing. Think of it this way, you have 100 people in your group. 5 are willing to pay for implant coverage at $100/mo, but to get that rate, you need 75% participation of the group. 95 people will not participate if it’s more than $20 a month. Your plan design is going to be designed to appeal to the 95 over the 5 and that broker is going to bring in a plan that is as close to $20/mo without going a penny over…and hope like hell that their competition isn’t lower with a similar plan design.
Usually this stops the service upselling.