Affordable Dental Insurance

Employers will often offer a sponsored medical health insurance benefits package to their employees. When you are part of a group plan, you share the cost of premiums with your employer, making this major medical coverage generally affordable. Your out-of-pocket expenses, including co-pays and elective procedures, are usually minimized.

These plans typically leave the dental health component out, much to the detriment of you and your family. Affordable dental insurance is fortunately easy to find on your own, so if your employer hasn’t acknowledged the importance of dental health, you can still cover your family on your own for a low monthly premium.

Since dental health professionals stress preventive care as the first step toward health, an all care dental plan covers the basics first: regular checkups, necessary cleanings, basic x-rays, and tooth sealants for your kids. These are the services you use most regularly, but if you pay for them out of pocket for you and your family members, that can add up to a lot of money in the course of a year.

Dental coverage is far less expensive than medical. Dental premiums average one-tenth the cost of medical premiums. The most expensive dental plan will probably cost you less than $600 a year in premiums, whereas if you bought medical insurance on your own, you could pay $6,000 or more plus tens of thousands in out-of-pocket expenses.

The cost of care is far less for dental procedures and preventive visits, too. The Centers for Disease Control state that over the past six years, health care costs rose an average of 14.7 percent every year, but the cost of dental care rose at half that rate. Dental care was cheap to begin with, so a slight rise in cost does not translate to large dollar amounts out of your pocket.

More than 130 million Americans are without dental coverage. While most people find the money in their family budgets to pay out of pocket for dental expenses, more than 25 million adults do not receive dental care in a given year because they could not afford it. The number of children who do not receive necessary dental care in a given year is slightly higher.

The cost impact on a person’s overall health can hardly be estimated. If you or your children do not receive even basic preventive dental care, decay, infections, pain and surgery are the likely result. Preventive dental care and enhanced services become far more affordable with dental insurance coverage.

When you have narrowed down the plans or affordable dental insurance companies that meet your family’s needs, make a telephone call to each potential insurer and ask specific questions. If the customer service representatives don’t know the answers, or can’t direct you to someone with the answers, move on to the next dental insurance company on your list.

Chances are if the customer service reps aren’t knowledgeable, you will have some trouble fixing a problem should one ever arise. It is better to know this before you spend you hard-earned money on premiums!