Dental Insurance: Putting Your Money Where Your Mouth Is

My 85-year old mother pays $39.00 extra per month for a "deluxe rider" that enables her to get dental coverage. Okay. Thirty-nine dollars times 12 equals $468 per year. Humana contracts with another company to administer this plan. (This fact took me almost a month to find out).

For this she gets $1000 off dental services. Stay with me, now. Her bill for dentures was nearly $2000. She paid a $964 co-pay for a full upper and a partial lower, plus approximately $150 for two visits, all of which she paid in full.

Yesterday, was her final visit; as we're leaving with her shiny new dentures, the front desk clerk says Humana's dental provider won't pay for two extractions that were necessary for her dentures to fit properly. The cost: $154

If extractions, a routine procedure, aren't covered under her Medicare Advantage plan, what is? (A letter we received recently states: "Routine and Non-Routine dental services are not a covered benefit under your Medicare Advantage.")

The result: she has paid almost $1200 in addition to her monthly deluxe rider premium.

In an article "The Oral Cost Spiral," http://www.slate.com/id/2229637/ part of a series on dentistry in America for Slate.com, June Thomas writes:

"Still, most middle-class Americans—even those with health and dental insurance—tend to be more aware of the price of dental treatment because they're more likely to have to pull out their checkbooks when they visit the dentist. Although dental-insurance premiums remained relatively steady over the last decade, especially when compared with skyrocketing medical-insurance premiums, between 1998 and 2008 the increase in the cost of dental services exceeded that of medical care and far exceeded the overall rate of inflation."

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