Dental Insurance
WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT DENTAL INSURANCE
In our practice, you will have some experienced minds helping you make the most of your benefits. Currently at our front desk the team has more than sixty years of combined experience working with all the various dental insurance companies.
If dental insurance helps defray $1000 or more of the costs of your dental care or maintenance each year, then you are very fortunate! Many adults have at least that much of an investment in restorative or maintenance of their dental health, if they want to keep their teeth their whole lives. (45% of our patients do not have insurance.)
At Fiddlehead Dental we look at dental insurance as a “thank you” that your employer has given you for your tireless work in their business, or, if you routinely contribute to your own insurance, then you are a thoughtful planner.
If you have specific questions about any terminology, or why we are not listed as "preferred providers" on your insurance company's list, just click on "FAQS" at the top of this page and choose "dental insurance" on the navigation menu that you will find there on the left. That particular area covers a lot of specifics.
Here's the bottom-line on Dental insurance:
You might be interested to learn that the California State Dental Society created the first dental insurance in 1961 and the average annual benefits have never been increased since. (Never,... not a dime of increase!) By design, dental insurance was never meant to mimic medical insurance. Dental insurance is structured to cover only a portion of employees’ dental expenses. As a matter of fact, in 1961, the first annual maximum dental benefit, per person, was $1000. As you may know, now after more than forty years, that amount is still exactly the same for most people - $1000/year.
It is easy to see that $1000 is a nice start at covering some dental expenses, but it should not be considered “the ceiling” which keeps you from achieving the best dental health.
I saw it calculated somewhere that if this amount had kept up with inflation, the average annual dental benefit would be more than $4500.
From time to time patients will tell us that they “only want to do what the insurance covers.” It is important to understand that insurance companies are in the business of turning a profit for their stockholders. They are not in the business to see that you have good teeth. Our team at Fiddlehead Family Dental is in the business of helping you keep your teeth for a lifetime. We can do that affordably with good planning and flexible, careful financial arrangements. We don't need to limit the state of health you can achieve because your dental insurance falls far short.
Bottom-line: We do not let insurance companies influence or limit the quality of care we might recommend. We count on good long-term planning and step-by-step treatment to insure you can afford our best work. If you direct us to only do what your insurance covers, we will always take care to be sure you understand what those compromises mean for the long term.
Frequently, we have patients whose treatment needs exceed their annual benefit, and we help them by keeping the quality of our care constant, and making only the timing of treatment a variable (see the tab at left for "care credit"). We have been making a written long-range treatment plan for every new patient since 1996. The patient can choose to do all the needed treatment in 2 months,.. or over 2 years. It's "the planning" that is important.
This approach has proven to be a wonderful method of enhancing smiles while respecting household budgets. We often tell people that thier teeth didn't deteriorate overnight and most often they don't have to be fixed overnight. '
If you have aging dental work or you are not proud of your smile, we will make you a plan to slowly move away from that condition into a state of predictable health. We've done it for thousands of people on a budget since 1993 and this methodology would probably work for you.