I was recently alerted to a post on thesimpledollar.com talking about how to afford quality dental care. The link for this post is at http://www.thesimpledollar.com/how-to-afford-quality-dental-care/. The article is written by Chris Sirico and was last updated on June 15, 2017. The article goes into some of the costs for common dental procedures and what you can do if you don’t have insurance. The article also goes into HSAs/FSAs, dental credit cards, dental financing, dental savings plans, dental insurance, and cosmetic dentistry.
The article provides a very nice chart about the average cost for various dental procedures with and without insurance. For example the average cost of removing a single wisdom tooth is $416 without insurance and has an average cost of $250 to $750 if you have insurance. As another example the average cost of a surgical tooth extraction is $401 without insurance and has an average cost of $334 with insurance.
The article says that if you don’t have dental insurance or have a limited budget then you can talk to the dental office staff to see if there is anything they can do to help. Dental financing or a dental savings plan may be able to help. With dental credit cards or dental financing there is usually a period between 6 months and 2 years where there is no interest due but then once interest is charged it can be quite high.
The article also talks about FSA (flexible spending account) and HSA (health savings account). The FSA plan allows you to pay money for dental care with special tax advantages and may be available through your employer.
The article also addresses dental savings plans which allow you to pay for dental care at a discounted rate. It is important to look into what the dental savings plan covers before signing up. It is not insurance but is like a special members only discount program.
The article also goes into dental insurance. It is possible your dental plan has a certain maximum it will pay each year and you may also have to spend a certain amount out of pocket to meet a deductible to be able to have the plan kick in. The article also goes into individual coverage vs. employer-provided coverage for dental insurance and closed vs open network dental insurance.
Of course the article also provides a few tips to keep your teeth healthy and help you avoid having to pay for costly dental procedures in the future. For those on more limited budgets and without good existing dental insurance through work the article on thesimpledollar.com is definitely worth a close look.