The 5 Secrets on Stretching Your Dental Dollar That Most Dentists Don t Want Me to Share Dr. Bryce Gates Think about it. There are 3 potential values with any product or service: the cheapest, the most convenient and the highest quality. Compare Walmart s Every Day Low Prices with Neiman Marcus First Class Customer Service. You can rest assured that you will get the cheapest price for a product at Walmart 24 hours a day, but trying to find someone to help you in your buying process is another story. Whereas, no one expects to find Every Day Low Prices at Neimans but from the moment you walk through the door you feel special and they will wrap it for you on the spot. All this to say, out of the 3 potential buying values, you can have one and sometimes two, but never all three at the same time. You can have cheapest and most convenient. Or you can have convenience and the best quality. But you can t have the cheapest, best quality and convenience all together. At Custom Dental we focus on delivering First Class Dental Experiences daily with convenient early and late hours realizing we will not be able to deliver this care at Walmart prices. However I will share with you 5 secrets that will stretch your dollar for the highest quality of service. 1. Use It or Lose It If you are fortunate enough to have some dental insurance coverage paid for or supplemented by your employer, this tip is for you. So you will better understand my tip, let me first explain dental insurance. Although sometimes confusing, dental insurance is not like medical insurance in many ways. This makes a huge difference in how you strategically use it. After meeting your co-pay obligation with medical insurance a percentage of all of your care is covered. Don t miss the key word in the last sentence was all. And you have no annual limit of coverage. You may have no events or multiple events in one year and it does not affect the percentage or amount that is covered. Dental insurance works much differently. After your co-pay is satisfied a percentage of your care is covered up to your annual maximum by insurance. Operative word is annual
maximum. All of your care versus annual maximum is the big difference. Medical insurance has no annual maximum. Dental insurance has an annual maximum. This annual maximum is reset every year at renewal date. So for example, if your annual maximum is $2,000 and you only use $1,000 of it in the insurance calendar year, you effectively lost $1,000 of potential coverage. There are no roll over minutes in dental insurance. You aren t covered up to $3,000 the next. So it is important that you are aware of how much coverage you have left in an insurance period and make sure you use every penny if necessary. I have known patients who needed a crown and had enough coverage in a previous year to help them with it but missed the cut off date and were forced to use it in a following year, which in effect limited their coverage for that year. As a side note, when dental insurance first hit the scene in 1976, the typical annual maximums were about $1,500 per year. A crown was typically $200. Today 40 years later, the typical annual maximum is still $1,500. What has stayed the same price for 40 years? I promise you that the cost of providing a crown has not. So no matter what your annual maximum is, use it or lose it. 2. An Ounce of Prevention Is Worth A Pound of Cure Okay, I know the hardest thing on the planet to sell is prevention. It s like selling snow cones in Alaska in the winter. The majority of security systems are sold right after someone in the neighborhood has been robbed. Many smokers wait to quit until they get diagnosed with cancer or emphysema. It s just the way we are. But I m going to give it a Boy Scout effort here, because I promised you 5 Secrets on Stretching Your Dental Dollars. Like many diseases, dental disease is a quiet creeper. Tooth decay doesn t hurt until it gets deep enough into the tooth to irritate the nerves. Gum disease doesn t hurt until you irreversibly lose enough jaw bone that your gums begin to swell and your teeth get loose. Regular dental checkups can detect dental disease before it causes pain or irreversible damage. One of the services we routinely offer is a dental sealant. Eighty percent of all tooth decay starts in the chewing grooves of your teeth. The grooves are so small that a toothbrush bristle cannot clean food debris out of them. If the right food is left in the grooves long enough under the right condition, bang! Tooth decay begins. Unfortunately, x-rays don t disclose tooth groove decay until it is too late. Many times the grooves are so small the dentist can t even get his pick in them to see if there are any soft spots, the beginnings of tooth decay. At our office we typically use a laser cavity detector to test the grooves. It is a painless procedure that uses a laser to test the softness in teeth grooves without the dental pick. Many times it can detect a cavity so small that it can be fixed
without a shot. But in teeth grooves with no decay, we recommend sealants. Sealants can protect the grooves on any permanent teeth in adults or children. And in some cases it is recommended even for baby teeth. By now you must be asking yourself So, how are sealants going to save me money? Good question. Here s how: Most insurance companies pay 100% for some teeth to be sealed. So that s a no brainer. However for those without insurance or their insurance doesn t cover sealants, it is still a money saver and here s why. A sealant runs about $32. An average a filling runs about $148. If you have insurance, you will have to satisfy at least a $50 co-pay and 20% of the filling. So with insurance it will cost you about $72 to get the tooth filed, more than double a sealant. And this doesn t even take into account that you now have a hole in your tooth that weakens the tooth, even with a good filling. You can seal every tooth in your head with grooves for less than one crown. I could go on and on how much an ounce of prevention with many procedures like regular cleanings versus gum therapy, fluoride treatments versus fillings and fillings versus root canals, crowns or implants can save you in the long run but I would probably be wasting our time. So for now, believe me when I say, An Ounce of Prevention is Worth a Pound of Cure and saves a wheel barrel full of cash. 3. Warranty with Service Let s face it, things break. Your teeth are used at least 1,100 times a year to eat. Jaw muscles are one of the strongest muscles in the body. They can exert up to 55lbs of pressure on the front teeth and up to 200 pounds on the back. Wow, those poor little teeth really take a beating. As you can imagine everything has to be just right for a crown or an implant to hold up to 200 hundred pounds of beating 1,100 times a year. As hard as we try to make it perfect, we still have a few failures. Many times we glean symptoms of failure and can intercept them at regular dental exams. Whoops there I go pitching prevention again. Sorry, I ll work on that one. However I was framing the topic of warranty. In our office, we warranty all major work for 5 years as long as you let us check it at regularly scheduled cleanings and exams. When you buy a car, a lawnmower or an appliance they always offer you a warranty. Because dental and medical procedures are performed on unpredictable subjects, like you and me, many in our profession are reluctant to make such an offer. So if you are considering a major procedure make sure you are clear on what happens if the procedure doesn t work as planned. Warranty with service will save you a small fortune if something goes array.
4. Stay Plugged In for Specials Okay so I made the point earlier that you can t keep your cake and eat it too. You can t have Walmart prices and Niemen Marcus quality. That being said, there is still a way to stretch your dental dollars without sacrificing the quality of the service by staying plugged in for specials. There are times when manufactures and vendors pass along special pricing for supplies or service. When that happens we love to pass it onto our patients. When we get a special price on braces, we can sometimes offer as much as $1,000 off. When we get specials from our implant manufacturer we can pass on as much as a $500 savings to you. When we get a special offer from our dental lab, we can pass on as much as $200 saving to you on crowns or dentures. I could go on and on, but you get the idea. When we get these special situations we want our patients to be the first to know. Staying plugged into your dental family newsletter and email communication system for savings opportunities can save you a pile of money. 5. Bundle Your Care We all know that bundling products or services can create savings. If you buy the 24 pack it is usually cheaper per unit than a 12 or 6 pack. If you add polish to your car wash it is cheaper than having it done separately. Dentistry is no different. I m going to let you in on a little known dental economic secret; one many of my colleagues don t want me to share. Every dental appointment costs a dental office money and time. It takes manpower to make appointments and appointment confirmation, enter them into the computer and follow up with any necessary paperwork. Between the labor to clean and sterilize an operatory, sterilize all of the equipment and throw away all of the disposables used at a visit, it costs an office at least $48 just to turn a chair. Typically, it takes the same chair time to numb one tooth as it does a mouthful. It takes about the same amount of impression material to take an impression of one tooth as it does a mouthful. If you have a certain instrument out to do a procedure it is quicker to use that instrument on multiple teeth at one appointment than using it on one tooth at multiple appointments. At the end of the day the only asset a dentist has is his expertise and time. He can always get more expertise, but he can never get more time. So if you can bundle your work and make the dentist more efficient, frequently they can extend to you a bundle of savings. So if you have a lot of care planned, talk with them about having fewer, longer appointments and bundling your care for some savings.
So there you have it. Many dentists would be upset that I let you behind the dental office curtain and transparently displayed the The 5 Secrets on Stretching Your Dental Dollar. I hope you are enlightened and can take advantage of your new found knowledge. If you are like most people who have downloaded The 5 Secrets on Stretching Your Dental Dollar, you will want our Welcome to a First Class Dental Experiences CD that gives you a virtual tour of our office. In the CD you will virtually meet Dr. Gates, his talented and caring team and see the inside of our office. To receive your FREE CD click here www.firstclassdentalexperiences.com After reading The 5 Secrets on Stretching Your Dental Dollar many want to call our office and chat with us. To talk to someone in our office please call Stephanie, our Director of First Impressions, at 439-452-2033. Dr. Bryce Gates Custom Dental 6351 S Custer Rd McKinney, TX 75070 PS. The first 25 who call in and request our Stretch Your Dental Dollar Let s Get Acquainted Visit will receive a $200 In Office Credit to be used for any out of pocket expenses. Don t MISS OUT call 439-452-2033 NOW.