When you don't have Dental Health Insurance

There are millions of Americans who live life on the edge with no health insurance. People who think about these numbers often forget though that there is one other thing that they need to take into account when it comes to health coverage - dental health insurance coverage. We live in a time when people who have regular jobs are expected to feel grateful just for the medical insurance they get. In many cases, that includes only very limited dental health insurance or none at all. A full 33% of America has no dental health insurance whatsoever.

Since individual dental health insurance is usually too expensive for most people, the only option they have is hoping that they never wake up one morning and find that they have a toothache - something that can require a root canal and a crown - thousands of dollars worth of expenses. Some people who have tried to head off any such expensive problems by going down the preventive maintenance route have found that simple dental checkups - cleanings and preventive fillings can set them back by hundreds of dollars too. Even people who have dental coverage find that when they have expensive dental problems, there is nothing that their coverage does for them. Almost all dental policies only pay for checkups and cleanings. Root canals end up getting only a small amount of dental coverage with a high deductible and even simple things like tooth-colored fillings can end up being denied.

Right now, about the best piece of advice that anyone without comprehensive dental health insurance can have is usually that they need to pay excessive attention to preventive care. They need to completely cut down on sugar, brush, floss and clean regularly. Those $100 cleaning sessions at the dentists are vital in catching and preventing expensive root canals and fillings later on.  When you don't have dental health insurance, you need to know exactly what you will end up paying for any procedure you check into a dental clinic for. Often, people will just go in for a routine checkup and cleaning. The dentist if he finds a problem, will right away treat it on the spot without asking for further permission. And then, he will present the poor patient with a bill that'll knock his fillings out. The thing is, when the dentist discovers a problem, he needs to just tell you. He mustn't treat you for it. This is because if you shop around, you're easily likely to find other dentists who quote lower prices. The price of a root canal for instance can easily vary by hundreds of dollars from dentist to dentist.

And then finally, a good way to get expensive treatments done would be to work out a payment plan with your dentist. That's a much better idea than paying with your credit card and paying the credit card company some punishing interest.

Surprise your Employees - Offer Dental Health Insurance

If you run a small business with, say, 20 employees, and you are interested in providing complete health coverage to them, you'll find that the market is awash in small business dental health insurance plans. If you have just finished negotiations arranging for general health insurance for your employees though, you'll find that dental health insurance, while it looks like a kind of afterthought, does offer just as much room for complication. Finding a plan that's affordable and that is yet comprehensive enough to satisfy you, you will find, requires just as much research and negotiating as a general medical plan.

Small businesses usually place the most importance on allowing general health coverage to their employees; prescription coverage stands next in importance. Dental health insurance usually comes in last even though everyone can expect to have dental problems from time to time and they can be expensive. The most popular plans for small businesses to offer, understandably enough, are the fully-funded employer plans (even if employees don't generally expect this). This is where you, the business owner, decide absorb the total cost of paying for coverage for your employees. There are partially-funded plans as well. Most businesses offer plans where employees pay 100% of what it costs; the business just offers to cover the administrative costs and so forth.

How you know what kind of plan to take and what to do about all the other details involved? No business owner should ever take a decision of this magnitude up to deal with on his own. There's just too much paperwork involved and there are just too many laws and rules involved that are always in flux. There's no way a businessman could adequately grasp all of this and work things out effectively on his own. You need to choose a third-party consultant who can put in the weeks of work needed set the ball rolling.

Picking a healthcare administrator, make sure that you look for someone who offers simplified claims processing, who has a great panel of dentists and who has a great record with other employers in your region. Most businesses considering offering dental health coverage to their employers often ask about what the standard, average dental plan looks like; they could work off it if they knew, they feel. What the standard plan is supposed to look like, will depend greatly on the kind of economic climate your industry happens to be in. Usually, the cost of a plan is priced by the number of dentists there are in your area, the zip code your business is in and the number of employees you bring coverage to. Most employees are usually happy with a 100% employee-financed plan. You could also join a multi-employer group. With maybe 20 employees, you usually could never find a competitive price with any provider. Get together with other small employers in your area, and you actually could work out a proper plan.

When you have Health Insurance Coverage that just won't Pay

What would you do if you had health insurance coverage for your wife who had heart disease, but if she felt like she had a heart attack approaching, your hospital denied her treatment because your health insurance company just refused to cover for any of the important tests involved?

The Senate Commerce Committee, investigating shocking behavior by the nation's health insurance coverage providers, has uncovered a pattern of completely egregious denials for test for serious diseases that should have been allowed. The investigation, that ran for six months, looked at nearly 2000 cases where patients with full health coverage were denied important tests to do with coronary artery disease. In all, about one in six Americans suffering from heart disease has been putting up with this kind of cruel denial of health insurance coverage. What exactly is going on here? How could they do this?

They could do this because doing this saves them money. Interestingly enough, the health insurance companies don't do the denying, themselves. They outsource the work of studying requests for tests that come in from doctors and of deciding whether the requests are reasonable. In most of the cases where patients have been illegally denied treatment, this kind of outsourced work was handled by a company called MedSolutions.

So if you were a company that studied doctors requests for tests for a health insurance company, why would you unfairly rule requests for tests as unnecessary? Well, if you were a company that vetted doctors' requests, you would want to appear useful, wouldn't you? The more requests you flagged as unnecessary, the more useful you would show yourself to be and you would stay in business. Perhaps, you even get paid an incentive for finding ways to deny requests. Yes, the rot runs deep.

So, do they really deny tests to patients who really seriously needs them for life-and-death situations? There have been cases that the Senate Committee has uncovered where patients would have died in 2 to 3 days if they had not received the recommended tests. Because their arteries were almost completely blocked. The worst part of it all is that these companies that take on work passing or denying requests for tests do not even employ qualified people. They just employ anyone; because, you know, that would save money.

And insurance companies have felt the need to be strict because left to their own devices, doctors just prescribe expensive tests left and right for no reason. Okay, it's not for no reason; it's because doctors and hospitals often own expensive test equipment and the more they recommend tests, the more money they stand to make. Once profit gets into healthcare, people completely lose their bearing.