Subscribe Feed (RSS)Your teeth are an important part of your appearance, and also an important part of your health. Bad teeth can not only impact your appearance and career prospects, they can also impact your health by making you more susceptible to disease and illness. Good individual dental insurance is a must for protecting your teeth and your health.
Let’s face it, dentistry is expensive and it’s not getting any cheaper. Emergency dental situations like broken or chipped teeth or a root canal can cost thousands of dollars which you’ll have to pay out of your pocket unless you have quality dental insurance coverage.
There are a wide variety of individual dental insurance plans available to folks. We’ll go through each type and let you know the pros and cons.
Indemnity dental insurance pays your dental service provider on a fee-for-service basis. This means that you pick your dentist, and the insurance picks up the tab minus your copay and premium. In most cases, indemnity individual dental insurance pays about 50 to 80 percent of the fees your service at the dentist incurs. You’ll have to pay the premium and the copay. Be warned however, indemnity dental insurance plans are the most costly form of dental insurance plans and have the highest premiums. Also most have a probationary period on certain procedures and a cap to how much coverage they’ll provide per year.
An HMO network plan is another form of dental insurance. These plans allow you to choose from a network of providers. The plan pays its providers a set fee for covering its clients each year. You’ll pay a monthly premium, usually about $5 to $15, and you’ll also have copays when you visit the dentist. Most plans offer free preventative care, but place a yearly cap on your benefits.
A PPO plan allows patients to choose from a network of providers, but instead of the flat fee that comes with an HMO, the dentist instead provides services to plan members at a discount. PPO plans also have an option where members can visit an out-of-network dentist, but if they do they’ll pay a larger percent of the cost of coverage out of their own pocket. The average monthly payment in a PPO is $20 to $25.
Another type of plan gaining in popularity is the direct reimbursement plan, in which your employer pays for a portion of your dental care. This will cost you more in out-of-pocket expenses and has tight caps on benefits, but you have the freedom to choose any dentist and you won’t pay monthly premiums.
As you can see, there are a wide variety of options available for folks who need quality individual dental insurance. You may not like having to pay the monthly premiums, but when an emergency arises and your plan covers a big chunk of the cost, you’ll see that it was money well-spent.
