You can always tell when insurance companies are desperate. We dentists receive all sorts of mailings, e-mails, and sales calls begging use to sign up to treat patients on their latest and “greatest” dental benefit plan.
Medicare Advantage health policies try to entice patients to sign up by including dental insurance plans in the package. Companies budget some small monthly plan cost, and then solicit dental benefit companies to concoct some crappy plan for that piddly amount. Then the difficult job comes of trying to dress the plan up for patients, in order to make it look like a thoroughbred stallion instead of the pig that it is.
Delta Dental’s latest attempt is truly amazing. The company wants dentists to provide dental treatment to Advantage plan patients for about half their regular fees. Since the overhead of the average dental office is at least 60% and sometimes as much as 75%, there is not much way honest dentists can turn any sort of profit.
So who signs up for these garbage plans? The usual suspects- unethical dentists, especially large corporate clinics, who have no problem with various types of procedure upcoding or outright billing fraud.
Not many Medicare Advantage plans are a wise idea anyway. Whatever you do, don’t insure with one because of the supposed great dental insurance you will receive with it. You will be greatly disappointed!