Here's my two cents as a dentist. My practice only took the top tier plan at Delta. That's because even the top tier Premier plan is about 20% or more off my regular fees. The PPO plans are about a 40-50% shave. The HMO plans are OMFG unprofitable to the point where the dentist is paying the patient to sit in the chair.
As a business, the office has to turn a profit. If I offer quality dentistry at 40-50% off, while my office overhead is 75-80%, I won't be in business for long. Heck, my hygienist makes $50/hour. Front office staff is $25-30. Same with good assistants.
The offices that take the cheapie discount plans are by and large either upselling you to a procedure that's not on the fee schedule or they're massively cutting corners to make a profit. I can send your crown to a top flight lab or I can send it to a lab in China. You'll never know the difference in the beginning, but the metal from China is who knows what composition, nevermind the inferior porcelain they use. And fit wise, I've never seen a cheapie crown that really fits all that well. Cheap porcelain doesn't look right, and it fractures much more easily.
The same goes for those Mexican dental clinics. What recourse do you have if something goes wrong? At least in America you have access to our court system and the dental societies make sure our members are performing at the standard of care. I can't tell you how many patients I've seen who went to Mexico to have work done and then when they came back, they found out it was a disaster. I'm talking about bridges and crowns that have giant open margins, overhangs of porcelain leading to trapping of debris and therefore leading to gum disease, implants that are only a few months old with 50% bone loss, and worse.
The discount dental plans operate by finding the cheapest dentists in each town and signing them up for their plans. I don't know about you, but I wouldn't want the cheapest guy in town cutting into my body.
The old adage of you get what you pay for is very true. Find a dentist who is willing to work with an all cash patient for a discount. Don't expect a 50% discount. If you get 5-10% off, I would say that's very fair. Find someone who doesn't jump around from chair to chair. Those guys double and triple book, and I just don't see how you can do very high quality work like that. At least I never could. I always booked one patient at a time and I took my time to make sure the procedure was done right.
2017 Ruby Red Platinum F450 - my kids call her "Big Red"
2018 Grand Design Reflection 28bh
