Welcome to Dental Plan Guy's home page.
My Mission:
To promote the importance of good oral hygiene.
To provide the information and tools necessary for the American public to make sound purchasing decisions with regard to dental care.
To help those who cannot wait to obtain access to a dental plan immediately.
Rising health care costs have forced many employers to cut back on benefits by dropping dental insurance. 108 million Americans currently have no dental insurance and that number is growing daily.
Many of those who have the opportunity to buy dental insurance on their own find the premiums too expensive and are electing just pay the dentist as they go. Even a dental PPO plan nowadays has family premiums often in excess of $100/month which is just not manageable for most people. Plans covering just preventive visits offer some rate relief but leave people with no coverage for root canals and crowns.
The current financial crisis is causing Americans to cut back on visits to the dentist resulting in:
50% of uninsured Americans cancelled necessary dental visits in the past year.
48% of children entering kindergarten hadn’t been to a dentist in over 12 months.
35% of Americans have not seen a dentist in more than a year.
50% of general practice dentists lost money in 2009.
Why should we care
Five times more common than asthma.
Seven times more common than hay fever.
Yet is the most preventable of all childhood diseases.
Untreated dental problems can become very costly. A root canal alone can be over $1,000.
Remove the cost barriers:
Make routine, preventive dental care affordable for the average person.
Have dental plans be available without annual maximums.
Improve access to dental care:
Eliminate waiting periods for dental care.
Include major services in all dental plans.
Dental Plan Guy solution: Paradigm Shift to Consumerism
Stop being a buyer of dental insurance and become a buyer of the services themselves under the banner of the cardinal rule of American consumerism: never pay retail! Insurance companies don’t. They either pay a specific amount that they predetermine (indemnity) for a particular service or, more commonly, have contracts with dentists to accept a schedule of reduced fees in exchange for a listing in a network. The more potential patients an insurance company can drive to a dentist’s office the larger the discounts they can command, and in the current economy the largest networks are negotiating discounts in excess of 70%. While some insurance companies have their own networks, many others contract with independent companies who develop and maintain the networks for them. This makes a lot of sense because it allows the insurance company to focus on their core business of sales and claims processing. Most important to us is that the networks are separate from the insurance companies and, therefore, available for rent. All we have to do is rent a network that offers both inexpensive access to quality dentists in our area along with great discounts (50% or higher, don't fall victim to one of those 20% so-called 'savings plans') and we're buying with the same clout as the big insurance companies. Read this article for examples of the significant savings now available to you. If you would like to see a comparison of over 30 (depending on your area) network plans with significant discounts available to you, click here.
Does your dentist participate in a network? Nearly two thirds of the nation's dentists now do. Click here and 'search dentist' for a listing of the network plans that a particular dentist belongs to.
Contact me at ronald@dentalplanguy.com or give me a call at 216.539.0589
