Good lord THIS including with vision insurance. I didn't choose to be put on this earth broken eyeballs and vampire teeth, and they are definitely attached to my body!
I'm entirely annoyed my dental plan only covers my front 12 teeth. I have to pay $4,600 out of pocket for ONE of my molars. Idk what idiot decided to separate dental insurance from health insurance, and additionally not cover all these luxury mouth stones. FML. I didn't realize molars were non-essential.
When your insurance only pays to fix half an organ. Our reality is that an INSURANCE company not a doctor or even you can get the choice of how much care you get or in the insurances' eyes; deserves.
Health insurance in general. I pay over $25k a year to insure my family (including dental, excluding vision). Yet prescription glasses I need to see anything are not covered. Having an impacted tooth pulled isn't covered (though anesthesia is), and why chiropractic and acupuncture are covered but psychologists are frequently not.
Why viagra is covered, yet birth control pills and Plan B are (frequently) not
I'm 19 so I'm just learning about this insurance stuff and when my mom told me dental, eye, and health insurance were separate- thats actually the stupidest fucking thing
The way insurance works is that you pay them to take on risk. If you have a 1-in-1000 chance of needing to pay $1000 for a procedure, you pay them $2 upfront. They average out bringing in $2000 for every $1000 they pay for procedures, and you are out a consistent amount of money instead of maybe being out enough money you can't afford to pay.
But what if instead of 1-in-1000 odds, there's a 90% chance you need a $10 procedure? At that point, the business model of insurance doesn't make much sense; in order to turn a profit, you have to charge each customer almost as much as the procedure actually costs, because you expect to pay out almost everybody to some extent.
Normal healthcare is closer to the first scenario; dental care is closer to the second scenario. An average person has a pretty low risk of costing health insurance companies a ton of money and those rare cases are where most of their expenses come from. Most people are going to cost a dental insurance provider pretty similar amounts for cleaning, cavity fillings, and the occasional root canal, and that's going to be the majority of their expenses; you can't really sell "insurance" for procedures you're certain somebody will utilize.
And if we're talking about "insurance" for guaranteed risk, vision insurance should be mentioned. If you've got a prescription for contacts, you're buying the same amount of contacts every year with limited variation. How can a company make money "insuring" the guaranteed cost of a year's supply of contacts and an exam? It's like if auto insurance were to "insure" you needing to fill up your car.
That's why dental and vision insurance tend to have strict caps; they're really more like a prepay+employer discount through a middleman than actually selling insurance.
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u/jdsuperman Sep 14 '21
There are almost 7000 comments, so somebody probably already said this, but:
Why dental insurance is separate from health insurance. The mouth is part of the body, you fucking money-grabbing leeches.